respect is due

It's that time...

2011-09-04T20:32:00.003-04:00

It's that time of year, when it's time for Respect is Due to return to the airwaves and bless your ears with '90s indie goodness.

With so many shouts of "90s revival!" in indie rock this year, I think the most important thing we can do is play some real, honest-to-goodness '90s indie rock to show all the revivalist bands how it's really done. Case in point: I just listened to a crappy song by Wavves called "I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl". With its title referencing sheltered suburban 90s childhoods listening to the alternative station, I'd have hoped that they'd take a chunk out of the '90s alternative rock book, but no! instead Wavves fuses '60s girl group handclaps with stiff '80s musicianship. Stiff as in they're holding their instruments so tight because they can't play them well enough to control them.

Fortunately, the real thing is young enough that some good bands like Archers of Loaf and Sebadoh are doing reunion tours. I went to see Archers of Loaf in Chapel Hill about two weeks ago, and hopefully will be seeing Sebadoh in October here in Pittsburgh. The Archers rocked the Cats Cradle and never seemed to run out of energy, and I'm hoping that Sebadoh will do a solid performance as well.

We'll be on the air Fridays from 7-9 PM, on WRCT, 88.3 FM in Pittsburgh, and hopefully some of you will tune in locally or online.

Recent Vinyl Finds

2011-05-29T12:03:00.003-04:00

Let me use this post to talk about a few vinyl records I've found while used vinyl shopping this month. Back in 2008, I asked for a cheap USB turntable for Christmas so I could listen to records -- but I had only two records at the time, both of which were promotional items that record labels threw in for buying their CDs. Merge Records had given me a Spoon single for buying Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga at an independently-owned record store, and Matador threw in a free Pavement LP when I preordered the remaster of Brighten the Corners from them. However, since getting a turntable, the world of cheap used vinyl and reasonably-priced new vinyl has exploded into the mainstay of many an indie record store, to the extent that I've surprised myself with the things I've found in the used bins

If you've taken a listen to my radio show in April or early May, you might have heard a band called Flower. Flower were a hardcore-inspired noise-rock band out of mid '80s New York City. They started out as an arty, angular synth-punk band, creating bleak, gritty new-wave inspired music that was, in the trend of American bands of the time, much more streetwise than the sheltered British hair-and-synth bands. They put out one EP, called Crash, which we have at the radio station, in this lineup. Then they dropped the keyboards and became an equally-arty (remember, this is New York City, home of Television and No Wave), but more hardcore-inspired, quartet, combining tight '80s drumming, guitar virtuosoship, and Mission of Burma-inspired noise for their first album Concrete. Their second album, Hologram Sky, was much more melodic -- almost a pop album, if you ask me -- but it still kept the bleakness and the noise. Later on, three quarters of Flower evolved into the indie rock band Versus, whom I play on my show all the time.

I won't post any music by Flower since, although their CD compilation Concrete Sky may be one of the few CDs on the list of rare CDs that are worth several times their original purchase price (I've seen copies online exceeding 50 bucks), the music on it is widely available on the Internet if you do a Web search. What I do want to talk about is that I was actually able to find the vinyl of Concrete during an inspired search at Pittsburgh's Mind Cure Records. Mind Cure's a relatively new store in Pittsburgh that stocks only vinyl, and mostly used vinyl. Looking through their selection, they seemed to focus on punk rock, indie rock, and experimental/progressive rock (I saw a ton of '70s prog stuff a la King Crimson, and I snagged a Kurt Vile record as well).

A few posts ago, I talked about the North Carolina-by-way-of-Connecticut trio Humidifier, and stated that I had no idea how one would go about acquiring their 1988 debut Misery's Redeeming. Well, it turned out there was a cheap used copy (in decent condition as well) at Charlotte's Lunchbox Records. So obviously, I snagged it and listened to it. If you went through Nothing Changes, Misery's Redeeming is a whole different animal: it's essentially your local college band going into a nice studio for a couple of days and recording their songs with no frills. Whereas Nothing Changes is more heart-on-sleeve, sappier, and more melodic -- and has echoes of Superchunk and Spent (remember, Humidifier contains the singer of Spent and the guitarist of Superchunk) -- Misery's Redeeming has lineage of '80s UK new wave like The Vapours, American post-hardcore like The Minutemen, and folky college rock like R.E.M. It's one guitar that sounds like it's played directly through the amp, tight post-punk style drumming, and some simple open chords. I made a crappy digital transfer and will be posting it in my next post.

Urusei Yatsura - Slain by Urusei Yatsura

2011-05-17T11:54:00.002-04:00

Damn, how I love Urusei Yatsura. Though Slain by Urusei Yatsura's not their best album in my opinion (that honor goes to the impossible-to-find, and sadly underrated, Everybody Loves Urusei Yatsura), this is my vote for the best of the two studio albums that were readily available in America in the 90s. Somehow their records got released by major labels in the States under the name Yatsura (so as not to infringe upon the copyright of the Japanese anime): We Are Yatsura was released by Primary Recordings, a pseudo-indie run by Elektra, and Slain by Yatsura was released by Sire, also part of the same corporate umbrella as Elektra. There is also a B-sides collection that only got released in America called Pulpo that I believe was on Elektra as well.

Even in the post-grunge era, where this kind of alt-rock band was snatched every day by the majors, it's hard to see where the commercial potential come in. On Slain, Urusei Yatsura come across as combining the post-punk energy of the Fall with the geeky pop of, say, (early) Weezer. The emphasis is on The Fall though, with the aggression and experimentalism of the former distilled into short, noisy pop songs about Dungeons and Dragons.

In the spirit of the concept of this blog, you can currently get a used copy of this record for a quarter on Amazon Marketplace. New copies seem to be a bit more pricey than the other two records I have posted, though.

Link: [here]

Balloon Guy - The West Coast Shakes

2011-04-30T00:48:00.003-04:00

My next choice of album is an album which I believe cannot be found for download anywhere on the Internet, "The West Coast Shakes" by Balloon Guy. As in, I do not know of a Mediafire or Rapidshare link to this album, and there are no songs by this band posted on Youtube. [Edit: This is not true! See the links at the end of this post] However, in the theme of the albums I am going to post, it is available on the cheap in the cut-out bin of the Internet that is known as Amazon Marketplace, and a couple of days ago, my order for a three-dollar used copy of this record came in.

The few places on the Web that have mentions of this obscure Minnesota band tend to say things along the vein that Balloon Guy are "slacker" rock. Sure, Balloon Guy's wobbly chords and drunken grunge schtick resemble a more groomed - yet far less consistent - Midwestern variant of Pavement, I certainly don't hear anything "slacker" about it. If anything, with every hit of the (two?) fast-decaying splash cymbals you can hear what sounds like an immense time and money commitment from the Warners' towards the album: the playing is tight, and the production sound is that big and glossy post-grunge sound seen on many a '90s major-label release.

I've only listened to "The West Coast Shakes" once and am, if anything, confused about what exactly Warners saw in this band. I feel that Balloon Guy could have been a respectably good Pavement clone on an indie label, but if anything, Balloon Guy personify the kind of disillusionment that Steve Albini wrote about in his essay "The Trouble with Music": the band that got courted by the majors, released an album that failed to go anywhere, and suddenly disappeared.

In general, Balloon Guy are much bluesier and have more '60s classic-rock and '70s prog-rock influence than any of their contemporaries such as the Archers of Loaf. I was disappointed the first time around, but by now I enjoy about half of the songs. Easily, Balloon Guy can go into the canon of overlooked Nineties alt-rock.

Link [here]
More info on the band [here]
More on Balloon Guy including some early indie-label singles: [link]
Want a real copy? Amazon Marketplace has new copies for a buck and used copies for a penny.

Humidifier - Nothing Changes

2011-04-23T17:32:00.003-04:00

Most people who know about indie rock have certainly heard of Superchunk: between them and their label Merge Records, they helped put North Carolina on the map, and repopularize a do-it-yourself approach in the wake of the major labels descending upon Seattle to sign every artist that wore flannel or had a single that sounded remotely like Nirvana.

The question remains, then, as to whether you've heard of Spent. Spent are sufficiently obscure and I might do a later post on them, but for now let me tell you what little I know of them. Unlike Superchunk, Spent were from New Jersey [I actually had to look this up -- I actually thought they were North Carolinians as well]. Like Superchunk, they had a whiny singer, John King, and they played a hyper, jingly-jangly blend of power pop and punk rock. Both were flagship bands of Merge Records in the middle '90s, but somehow Spent faded into obscurity after two albums, both of which you can find for a buck on Amazon [side note: Though I got their first record, Songs of Drinking and Rebellion, for a buck on Amazon marketplace, I managed to find their second record used on vinyl, so you might just get lucky like that].

Humidifier, then, is a merger of Superchunk and Spent. And when I say a merger, I don't just mean that their sound is a sonic child of the two, combining the more hyper elements of Superchunk with the more melodic, quirky guitar work of Spent - I actually mean that one of Humidifier's three members, vocalist/guitarist John King, sang in Spent, and another, bassist/guitarist Jim Wilbur, played guitar in Superchunk.

Humidifier actually formed in the '80s while the members were in college in Connecticut and released an album, called Misery's Redeeming, on a local Connecticut label, but this record is extremely obscure and I would have no idea how to find it (Edit: I found it completely unexpectedly! I'll be listening to it soon and will tell you more about it in a later post). There are a few mp3s of its songs, as well as some more detailed history of the band, here. But then, with two of the members finding mainstream indie success in Spent and Superchunk, Humidifier fell by the wayside until around 1996, when they holed up in Brooklyn's Rare Book Room studios for a weekend and recorded Nothing Changes, which is the record I have here for you.

Lots of people who've heard this one dismiss it as a mediocre second-rate version of Spent and Superchunk - but I find the songwriting to be up to par with both of those bands (this would make sense!). Tell me what you think!

Download: [here]
More Songs and History: [here]
Even More Songs: [here]
Want Your Own Copy? Amazon has new ones for a buck and used ones for a penny.

Nothing Changes? Nothing Changes!

2011-04-23T17:22:00.002-04:00

Ever heard of those stories about commercial radio stations where right in the middle of an alternative rock song, they announce they're doing a format shift, say, to pop-country or top 40 or rock or Latin music? We're not going to do that here at Respect is Due, but I'd like to try something a little different.

On my show, I tend to play lots of '90s indie rock that's either out of print or really hard to find, and I'd like to have a way that you can introduce yourselves to these bands.

At WRCT, we at one point had the idea of doing a WRCT blog, where each of the station members wrote a column about something music-related every month or couple months, and it got posted. My idea for a column was to take an obscure and out-of-print indie or alt-rock album that can be found on the cheap (as in, for one penny) in the online cut-out bins that are the Amazon Marketplace and write about it, possibly even linking to a download of the music. The idea of focusing on "cut-out" records would be to highlight themes of forgotten, ignored, and underrated music: bands that have been neglected to the "cut-out" part of the virtual record store (I'd say brick-and-mortar record store here, but sadly, these are going the way of the dinosaur) but are worth more than their 99-cent price tag.

In the column, I would have focused more on the history and context of the album: for example, if it was from Louisville, try to explain why Louisville was big shit during the early Nineties, and how the band may have fit in along the Chicago-Louisville greats like Slint and Rodan. I would have focused on '90s indie albums, but there would be no reason why I couldn't highlight an album from the Noughts or the Eighties once in a while (in fact, you will be seeing one from the Noughts soon!).

Well, I'll be trying this for a while, linking to some downloads of this obscure and out-of-print music, and hoping someone out there wants to hear these bands as much as I enjoy listening to them.

[For the record, the title of this post is a bit of foreshadowing towards the first record I plan to post.]

"I'll be Bach..."

2011-02-25T22:31:00.003-05:00

We at Respect is Due are back in action... well, at least for this week. Next week's show and the week after's will be canceled due to Spring Break over at CMU. But what's important, at least for now, is that there is no sports pre-emptions anymore.

Today's playlist was standard and straightforward compared to other shows. I have, however, been digging through the 7" singles part of the library more often than I used to, and trying to play more singles I've never heard before instead of just looking for "Frog" by Versus yet again. Granted, "Frog" is an awesome song, and Versus are an awesome and fitting addition to the K/International Pop Underground canon. I just play it too much, probably because "Frog"'s never been released (to my knowledge) in any other way except for on one 7" single. And you can guess what the next thing I'm going to say is: I don't know of any other place you can hear stuff like this on the air except for this show.

By the way, if you do know of any good college radio shows that play the type of old-school indie rock I tend to play, please tell me. A lot of the music I listen to I learned about due to a number of great shows (most of which aren't around anymore, sadly) on Boston College's still-excellent WZBC that played lots of British post-punk and shoegaze as well as '90s American indie.

If you want the playlist, take a look at it here.

Who Knows When...

2011-01-21T20:52:00.002-05:00

...this show will come back to the air. Essentially, if anything, this is a rant about the basketball season more than anything else. The DJ after me, Paul, who does the wonderful "Viva Le Mock" show after mine, and I both have our shows interrupted due to basketball season, and we agreed on a way to allow both of us to get on the air despite the basketball games. Unfortunately, that was based on the assumptions that basketball games would happen on certain days and not happen on others. Today there was supposed to be no basketball games, but instead the airwaves will be graced with two.

At this point, it's likely that there will be a show next week, but it's also likely you won't hear Respect is Due until Massive Music Weekend. What we do on Massive Music Weekend is split the weekend into 120 half-hour blocks, and devote each block to a specific band or artist. You'll be hearing Massive Music Weekend blocks of Pavement, Versus, Unrest, Mogwai, and a few others I can't recall, from yours truly, if my requests get approved and on the schedule.

Until then, there's tons of new music to listen to and enjoy. Tapes 'n Tapes put out a good new one, Outside, and I've heard good things about the new Deerhoof and Decemberists records (the Deerhoof one's sitting on my desk, unlistened to -- hopefully this will change soon). There's a new band from England called Yuck that actually are deserving of the Pavement comparisons they get; their record comes out next month on Fat Possum Records, truly signaling the end of that label's tenure as a blues label and rebranding it as a home for vaguely lo-fi guitar-based buzz-band indie rock.

Stuff.

2010-11-07T14:05:00.002-05:00

I was out last week since I had to go play Capture the Flag With Stuff, which happens at the same time as Respect is Due. The rules give a good picture of what type of "game" Capture the Flag With Stuff - or, CTFWS (say it: "ka-toff-was") - is: pure anarchy, something like eighty to a hundred people on a team with minimal semblance of organization trying to do God knows what.

As this is a game designed for computer scientists by computer scientists (protip: never was I ever a computer scientist) all the stuff has "magical" abilities. As in, you are immune to other people's attacks if you wear the blue belt, and are skipping around and holding hands with (hopefully) friends singing the lyrics to that great ditty known as Yankee Doodle. I think that gets the idea across.

If you're in Pittsburgh or at Carnegie Mellon and are thinking about CTFWS, please be a sane person and don't go. Unless everyone else you know is going - then there's actually somewhat of a reason to brave the insanity.

Believe me, you'll thank me later.

The moral is: there will be music next week. Real music. As in, people playing real musical instruments.

On a completely irrelevant note, I actually got to listen to Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion yesterday. You know, the one that Pitchfork hyped until oblivion. It was, shall I say, underwhelming. They came off to me as synthpop Talking Heads wannabes who felt their songs were some ironic combination of "cute" and "precious" - they're the type of band that you like not because it's good, not because it's original, but because you were told to like it, and you knew your hipster friends would disown you otherwise. I'd listen to the Talking Heads any day instead.

This Should be a Witty Title

2010-10-24T22:00:00.002-04:00

...but it's not. Instead it's a very lazy, uninspired attempt at being "meta" or "postmodern" or whatever you elitist, intellectual hipster types want to call it. In other words, it's the lack of an interesting title.

As usual, here is the link to last Friday's playlist. The Friday before - October 15 - Paul, who does Viva Le Mock after my show, didn't show up, and his DJ sub didn't want to DJ, so I went until somewhere after midnight. Unfortunately, I don't think the stuff I played in the last three hours was anywhere near as interesting as it should have been, though I did play lots of stuff I don't play normally since it doesn't fit into the concept and manifesto of my show.

What's most interesting about playing during Paul's time is that I got callers from several of Paul's long-time listeners, and it was occasionally quite difficult to explain that Paul wasn't here and he would be back next week. This isn't my first time encounter with some of Viva Le Mock's odder long-time listeners: sometime last May, someone did an instant message request for something like 10-15 songs (almost in a row - it was something like two hours of programming), all of which were fairly esoteric "college rock" hits of the Eighties. Incidentally, I was again doing Paul's normal spot, sometime around Midnight on a Friday night. But the end result is I learned (or relearned) about a lot of esoteric music that we'd otherwise forget about since the vinyl records are stuffed away in record libraries like ours.

Now that I've said all of this, if you're actually on this blog because you listened to my show once, you should seriously consider listening to Viva Le Mock after my show. Paul is an awesome DJ and he knows more about music than essentially anyone else I know.

Back to last Friday now. I was DJing my show on Friday, as is standard, and I got some request calls as is standard. All of which were good requests - there was some Archie Bronson Outfit, some Volcano Suns, some Microphones. All good bands that fit the conceptual ideas of my show. Now we'll fast-forward to today. In my real life as a mathematician -- well, a college student studying math, but you get the point -- the common event on Sundays is to eat lunch out and play Scrabble with friends -- well, usually whoever shows up, but those are mostly friends. We went this week to Taiwan Cafe, a basement hole in the wall that has a full selection of the cheap Forties of malt liquor seemingly preferred by students of the adjacent University of Pittsburgh but somehow has some of the best (and cheapest) Chinese food in the world. If you're in Pittsburgh, you should seriously go here if you want Chinese food -- but this is a huge digression.

We're returning back to Carnegie Mellon and, almost at campus, someone in front of me screams to me something along the lines of "I played the Microphones!" It didn't take long to connect this to the request for the Microphones on my show, but I still can't parse this any more, beyond that this is one of the first times someone who's not family or a close friend has mentioned Respect is Due in any way in real life. Also, I feel like I should know who this person is, but my mind is completely drawing a blank. The most I can guess is that she must have requested the song, but I still can't parse anything more. Except that I possibly can't function socially, but that's not within the domain of this blog (thankfully), so we'll not go there.

I think sometime this week I'm going to need to revisit The Glow Part II. The three or four times I have managed to finish the record from start to finish, I've been in awe. I think my problem with the record back when I tried listening to it is that, since it has a rather full dynamic range, with minimal dynamic-range compression, it's easy to lose attention during the quiet parts (which are well over half the album) and forget about what Phil Elverum (however does he spell his name now??) did well: created the type of album that rewards those who start at the beginning and don't stop until the end of the record.

An Exercise to the Listener

2010-10-02T00:09:00.002-04:00

I don't think there's much of note in the last two shows, but it's hard to say. I've been trying to throw new bands into the fairly regular circulation of records that seems to come out for every show I do - something to break the standard Pavement-Versus-Yo La Tengo monotony that seems to be typical of the standard Respect is Due show. Pavement, Versus, and Yo La Tengo are amazing bands - all three of them - and although I wouldn't mind devoting shows to each, I'd wonder if I'd be boring my listeners by focusing on my specific, particular interests instead of trying to connect songs in ways that highlights the interconnectiveness of all of indie music's subgenres.

I ended up finding an interesting 7" single by a band called Drums and Tuba in the library. The A-side contains drums and spiky, trebly math-rock guitar, and seems to be missing the large brass cousin of the euphonium... until the spoken word lyrics start. You see, the song on the single is a spoken word rant about the singer (tubist?) getting harassed by the police for practicing his tuba on the campus of a state university. No idea whether it's a real story, but the delivery and timing give it something most math-rock doesn't have: a sense of humor. You look at something canonical like Slint or Don Caballero and despite the level of musicianship, it's hard to see them take a joke about their music. With Slint this seems to work well - but with Don Caballero you get the same type of technical wankery that make Emerson, Lake, and Palmer the laughing stock of music elitists today.

It also reminds me that I've seen people practicing tuba outside on campus here at CMU several times - it seems to be a common enough practice, actually.

Take a look at this week's playlist if you're interested. I think you'll get what I'm saying about getting into a musical rut with a standard circulation of albums - there's usually a Versus cut, a Prisonshake cut, et cetera... in each show, where a significant portion of the music I've ever listened to goes virtually untouched at the hands of a select few albums.

For Everything

2010-09-18T23:09:00.002-04:00

This post is called what it's called because through my big-arse headphones now, there is an Eleventh Dream Day song with the aforementioned title playing. Again, no particular reason for the title other than it exists -- and that's good enough of a reason.

I mentioned last week that my note headers in class tend to be bad puns or indie-rock references. With that completely in the front of my mind, I ended up breaking a differential equations lecture - on autonomous differential equations, and qualitative methods for analyzing their solutions, if you've any tiny interest in the mathematical content - into chunks named after all the Versus albums. Unfortunately, there weren't enough chunks to pass 1998's Two Cents Plus Tax, incidentially the last they recorded for a major label before settling down with Merge.

Speaking of Versus, I ended up at Paul's CDs and got Hurrah on vinyl a week ago. Probably the only good thing about hipsterdom and its growing influence on mainstream culture is that vinyl has never been more readily available (well, at least in my lifetime), and it seems like the price of vinyl is (slowly) becoming more reasonable to the extent where even I can start a vinyl collection. You can still go spend 30 or whatever dollars it is on one of those 180-gram double-vinyl behemoths where, for some reason, they deem it necessary to split 35 minutes of music onto two records, but I think Matador Records got it right by splitting Interpol's new release into a "standard" and a "deluxe" vinyl issue. The standard one puts the 45-minute-or-so record onto a standard weight disc and sells for about what you'd expect to pay for the CD, and the deluxe one goes for all the 180-gram, double-disc, gatefold stuff that we mortals cannot hear how it sounds different.

I had a show yesterday. Here is the playlist. I think it's a lesser playlist than the past few weeks --too many long songs, but that's how I felt, I guess -- but I managed to play one of my favorite Minmae songs. I mentioned Minmae when I first heard of them in a post on Pavement clones, and remarked that out of the three I profiled, they sounded the least like Pavement. Like Blitzen Trapper, the influence is there, but their vocalist's deadpan baritone and the country musical arrangements make them resemble a more experimental, unpredictable Silver Jews.

Let's Prove a Theorem!

2010-09-10T22:08:00.003-04:00

I'm not certain what the title has to do with anything. Really, it's the first thing that popped into my mind. In the same way, most of my note headers when I take notes in class tend to be lines from indie songs, obscure music references, or bad math puns -- neither of which have to do with, say, ordinary differential equations.

I've been jockeying the disks for two weeks now. On the air-shift proposal, they ask us to write a promo, and I mentioned on the promo how we would take a historically-minded tour through the bands and labels of the glory days of '80s and '90s indie. I look at my playlists for the past two weeks and think that's the era of indie rock that my show's been lacking! For the most part, though, the new albums I play tend to be from established bands and performers that have been there since before I was born- Mary Timony (who's been at it since the days of Simple Machines Records), Eleventh Dream Day, The Vaselines, and so on.

My show is from 7PM to 9PM on Fridays now. Since it's a two-hour show and that usually means I can fit 25 to 30 songs, I'll be linking to the playlist on the wrct site as opposed to typing the playlist out by hand (this takes much longer than you think! and the wrct playlist has most everything -- just not always the year of release)

Here is today's. I think the highlight is the Skeptics song. AFFCO. From what I know, this record's quite obscure and near impossible to find, at least in the States. Skeptics were an industrial/noise band that were doing their thing on, out of all labels, Flying Nun. I was quite happy to find the vinyl sitting in the library, though I was unhappy that it seemed unloved -- I had to add Skeptics into the database, which implies nobody's played it in the past decade or so. Why such good music goes to waste baffles me.

Fake Indie Songs

2010-08-17T09:53:00.002-04:00

We drove up to college to move in in a rental car -- some model by Dodge that allegedly has a huge blind spot -- and, as is typical these days, satellite radio, provided by the merger of XM and Sirius, was provided. What this means is the trip over provided a rare chance to see what normal people listen to.

I'll first say that the XM-Sirius people make some odd choices as to what music goes on each station. In the rock stations alone, there is an all Elvis all the time station, a Jimmy Buffet-run station (I presume on it you hear all those Jimmy Buffett soundalikes, like the dude who sang the "Pina Colada" song), and -- how do they find enough material for 24 hours of this -- a Bruce Springsteen all the time station. The only thing that seems to connect most of the rock stations is they (almost all) play the music of our parents' (or older brothers/sisters) generation -- stuff that must have rocked the airwaves of terrestrial radio back in the 1970s or 1980s, when it was, dare I say it, considered new and exciting.

There is also an indie-rock station . Somehow, by using the words "indie rock" in its promotional materials, I guess they think it legitimizes whatever music it plays, giving it the "indie rock" label just because they say it deserves it. And to be honest, I heard a ton of indie music on that station, but very little rock music. There seemed to be two trends: first, most every contemporary song of the last year they played was an electronic song, like "Infinity Guitars" by Sleigh Bells. Sleigh Bells themselves are quite an interesting peek at what gets the hipsters excited and a rather concise summation of the development of the so-called "postmodern" music, but that's for another post. Second, most every rock song they played was either at least twenty years old or was designed to sound like it was.

In short, if you liked the post-punk revival, a couple hours on the fake indie station at XM-Sirius could turn your admiration into seething hate for all these damn bands that sound the same. At one time, I joked that all the bands you heard on the station were all studio musicians, which some major label boss told, "First, make a song that sounds like Echo and the Bunnymen, and then make another song that sounds like the Cure" -- and there is a point in this, since after a few hours, I rather would be listening to the Cure or Echo and the Bunnymen.

Back to actual terrestrial radio, Respect is Due should be on the radio in two weeks' time. The plan this semester is to have a two-hour show; only one hour to spin records means there isn't much freedom to go off in different directions or play particularly long songs. We get air-shift proposals next Wednesday, and the new season starts August 30 -- the Monday immediately following. Stay tuned for more info.

We're No Here

2010-05-08T17:36:00.002-04:00

Actually, I don't think the blokes from Mogwai got this one right. We're still here, if only for a tiny little bit. I've been doing shows every Friday. It's currently "Random Schedule", meaning that there are no official timeslots and things are "first come first serve". Yesterday I didn't DJ from 7 to 8, but from 10:30 PM to 1:30 AM, in light of someone taking my 7-8 slot to do electronic music.

The big point is that since there are still shows, there are still playlists. You should be able to get all the details for non-random schedule playlists here. Random schedule playlists are in the database, as well: here is Friday's, and here is Tuesday's.

April 16, 2010

2010-04-18T21:53:00.002-04:00

Several hours before my show, I went to a Thai restaurant. What we - and by we I mean me and the people I went to lunch with - commented on was not the food, but the Muzak playing on the loudspeakers in the restaurant. While eating our curries and pad thais, we were serenaded by Wilco, Belle and Sebastian, the Arcade Fire, and Broken Social Scene.

The moral, if anything, is that if you can hear that type of stuff as background music at a fairly pedestrian Thai restaurant - I certainly didn't smell any search for the pretense of an "indie" image there - then what's the purpose of playing it on the airwaves, when people are (allegedly) tuning to us to find stuff they'll "hear nowhere else"? Granted, you are going to find the Arcade Fire and the Broken Social Scene on every fifteen-year-old's iPod in between the Taylor Swift and the Killers. The question this raises for my show is how we are going to perform the subtle dance between playing music because it's good - after all, Broken Social Scene are one of the best and most interesting bands of the past decade - and because it's something you won't hear anywhere else.

I actually wanted to play the Arcade Fire on Friday's show. I just couldn't find the CDs.

Another interesting bit about my show was the automation block that followed it. Rerewind didn't show up again, and I had the 8:00-9:00 hour as well; however, I already had plans to go smoke the hookah with some friends, so I cut the show at 8:30, and turned automation on. So that the station is always playing something while the transmitter is on, we program a computer to play music randomly. The thing is that, normally, automation plays really esoteric experimental music. I ended my show with a song by Wire that fit those criteria - esoteric and experimental - perfectly: it was just twenty minutes of arhythmic noise. But then... automation was playing Mates of State and Cursive. Talk about a change of roles.

Playlist:

Hour 1:
1. Railroad Jerk - Bang the Drum [from 1995's One Track Mind] (2:46)
2. Red Sparowes - A Mutiny [from 2010's The Fear is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer] (5:31)
3. Mogwai - I Love You, I'm Going to Blow Up Your School [from 2008's The Hawk is Howling] (7:33)
4. Versus - Frog [from 1994's Frog 7"]
5. Happy Birthday - Too Shy [from 2010's Happy Birthday] (3:00)
6. Air Miami - World Cup Fever [from 1995's Me Me Me] (2:12)
7. Barcelona - I Have the Password to Your Shell Account [from 2000's Zero One Infinity] (3:10)
8. Archers of Loaf - Last Word [from 1993's Icky Mettle] (3:36)
9. Comet Gain - Germ of Youth Part II [from 2009's Broken Record Prayers] (2:18)
10. The Volcano Suns - Jak [from 1985's The Bright Orange Years] (2:01)
11. Los Campesinos! - Plan A [from 2010's Romance is Boring] (2:02)
12. Double Dagger - The Lie/The Truth [from 2009's More] (2:56)
13. Galaxie 500 - Listen, The Snow is Falling [from 1991's This Is Our Music] (7:48)
14. Spoon - Decora [from 2004's Old Enough to Know Better: 15 Years of Merge Records] (3:12)
15. Yo La Tengo - I Heard You Looking [from 19923s Painful] (7:01)

Hour 2:
16. Guided by Voices - Motor Away ["Hi-Fi" Version] [from 1995's Motor Away 7"]
17. Strapping Fieldhands - Boo Hoo Hoo [from 1994's Discus]
18. The Clean - Big Soft Punch [from 1990's Vehicle] (2:32)
19. The White Stripes - Little Ghost [from 2010's Under Great White Northern Lights] (2:23)
20. Silkworm - Three Beatings [from 1992's L'Ajre] (6:52)
21. Snow Patrol - NYC [from 1998's Songs for Polar Bears] (4:27)
22. Mission of Burma - Weatherbox [from 1982's Vs.] (3:25)
23. The White Stripes - Black Math [from 2010's Under Great White Northern Lights] (3:06)
24. Pavement - Fillmore Jive [from 1994's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain] (6:38)
25. Wire - A Panamanian Craze? [from 1996's Turns and Strokes] (16:15)

Teenbeat Records

2010-04-09T22:37:00.002-04:00

I had a two-hour show today, because the DJ who typically goes after me, DJ Arsenal of the show Rerewind, couldn't make it into the station. So there was two hours of (mostly) glorious early Nineties indie rock. Because someone needs to let it be known that Pavement wasn't Mark Ibold's first band; because someone needs to let it be known that the buzz bands of twenty years ago are far superior to today's buzz bands.

I very loosely focused the show on Teenbeat Records. I say loosely because I am just learning about Teenbeat myself, and just rummaging through the library for even ten minutes, I could find you twenty or so Teenbeat bands that I have never heard of. Essentially, there was a band called Unrest in the late Eighties who started a record label to distribute their homemade cassettes of noise; this band eventually became a big force in pigfuck and post-hardcore and eventually reinvented themselves as twee revivalists. The inspiration for a Teenbeat show came from listening to an LP called "Kustom Karnal Blaxploitation" - yeah, it's got all of those weird spellings like you'd see on the early Pavement records - that was made by Unrest in 1990. Expecting some sort of indie pop, I was jarred to see a record that juxtaposed aggressive post-hardcore in the style of the Minutemen and Helmet with melodic, subdued indie pop. And slowly, I built a show around playing Unrest at the beginning.

The other Teenbeat bands I know are Dustdevils (Mark Ibold's pre-Pavement band!), Eggs, and Versus. Each got one song, with the exception of Versus, which got two; I've listened to probably close to half of Versus' output so far, and would say I'm more comfortable choosing a song by them.

It's amazing to think that I discovered Versus about a year ago, when I was too sick to eat anything and I couldn't listen to Hazards of Love another time without heaving. Finally, I got their classic Secret Swingers from the radio station and was disappointed by it for nearly a year. It's probably thirty listens later and I'm just beginning to understand Versus' songs, though rockers and ballads at the surface, have a melodicism that you just don't see anywhere else.

I got a request for a band called Chavez. Apparently they were on Matador, and I've never heard of them. The track I got requested was awesome; I need to hear more.

Anyway, here's what I played:

Hour 1:
1. Unrest - Invoking the Godhead [from 1990's Kustom Karnal Blaxploitation] (4:00)
2. The Album Leaf - Summer Fog [from 2010's A Chorus of Storytellers] (4:43)
3. Maserati - No More Sages [from 2009's Passages] (5:15)
4. The Vaselines - Molly's Lips [from 1987's Dying For It EP] (1:44)
5. Eggs - It's Hard to Be an Egg [from 1995's How Do You Like Your Lobster?] (2:44)
6. Versus - One Million [from 1996's Secret Swingers] (3:43)
7. Guided By Voices - Asphyxiated Circle [from 2004's Half Smiles of the Decomposed] (2:40)
8. Chavez - Break Up Your Band [from 1995's Gone Glimmering] (2:57) thanks for the request!
9. Girls - Hellhole Ratrace [from 2009's Album] (6:56)
10. Mission of Burma - Einstein's Day [from 1981's Vs.] (4:36)
11. Thinking Fellers Local Union 282 - Catcher [from 1992's Mother of All Saints] (2:27)
12. Thingy - Cottingley Fairies [from 1997's Songs about Evil...] (1:35)
13. The Olivia Tremor Control - Memories of Jacqueline 1906 [from 1996's Dusk At Cubist Castle] (2:15)
14. True Widow - Bleeder [from 2008's s/t] (5:57)
15. Mekons - Lost Highway [from 1985's Fear and Whisky] (2:59)

Hour 2:
16. Stephen Malkmus - No More Shoes [from 2005's Face the Truth] (8:00)
17. Cub - What The Water Gave Me [from 1993's Betti-Cola] (1:15)
18. Spoon - Written in Reverse [from 2010's Transference] (4:18)
19. Dustdevils - Hip Priest [from 1991's Strugglin' Electric and Chemical] (10:34)
20. Yo La Tengo - I Threw it All Away [from 1989's President Yo La Tengo] (2:17)
21. Pens - Horsies [from 2010's Hey Friend! What You Doing!] (2:00)
22. Low - Closer [from 2001's Things We Lost in the Fire] (5:06)
23. Broken Social Scene - Ibi Dreams of Pavement [from 2005's s/t] (4:27)
24. Wolf Parade - Kissing the Beehive [from 2008's At Mount Zoomer] (10:52)
25. Mogwai - Hunted By a Freak [from 2005's Government Commissions] (4:09)
26. Primal Scream - Gentle Tuesday [from 1987's Sonic Flower Groove] (3:47)
27. The New Pornographers - Three or Four [from 2005's Twin Cinema] (3:07)
28. Versus - Blade of Grass [from 1994's The Stars are Insane] (3:56)

We're Official.

2010-04-03T00:03:00.003-04:00

In the words of the men and women in commercial radio, we've shifted formats. But this is not a format shift in the sense of the stations that shifted from alternative to Latin with no notice to the listener - this is a subtle format shift, one that may have happened already. Where our goal was initially to analyze how music intersects with itself - that is, prove that it's a nonempty intersection set - we're slowly moving towards an analysis of these playlists for some show on the radio you may or may not have heard.

So you, the dear reader, don't get lost, we stream here. You're better off choosing one of the high-quality streams, either MP3 or Ogg Vorbis. Ogg Vorbis? Yeah, we're nerds like that. That's just the hierarchy of life at Carnegie Mellon.

My opinion is that this week's music shows few surprises, barring that Bob Die-lan track - you know, from the album where he quit smoking and decided to sing, as if to challenge critics who'd rather die than hear his voice. Tell me you saw that rimshot groaner coming. You might as well ask why the chicken crossed the playground.

1. Enon - Old Dominion [from 2002's High Society] (3:02)
2. Red Sparowes - In Illusions of Order [from 2010's The Fear is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Truth] (7:36)
3. F*cked Up - I Hate Summer [from 2010's Couple Tracks] (2:15)
4. Quasi - Repulsion [from 2010's American Gong] (4:22)
5. Bob Dylan - I Threw It All Away [from 1969's Nashville Skyline] (2:28)
6. Belle & Sebastian - Like Dylan in the Movies [from 1998's If You're Feeling Sinister] (4:14)
7. Galaxie 500 - Ceremony [from 1990 [?]'s EP] (5:56)
8. Deerhunter - Agoraphobia [from 2008's Microcastle] (3:22)
9. Archers of Loaf - Web in Front [From 1993's Icky Mettle] (2:04)
10. 764-HERO - Photographic Evidence [From 2002's Nobody Knows This is Everywhere] (4:03)
11. Orange Juice - Rip It Up [From 1982's Rip It Up] (5:19)
12. Sebadoh - Scars, Four Eyes [From 1991's III] (3:35)
13. Volcano Suns - The Mouth That Roared [From 1985's The Bright Orange Years] (3:15)

Respect is Due

2010-03-26T23:19:00.002-04:00

You know - I might have been convinced over the past week about something - and it's that "Respect is Due" might just be the best name for my show.

What I really like about it is that, well, it's been sitting in front of me for the four years I've had this blog. And the main idea - that it's about giving respect to the forgotten bands; not the trends of now, but the trends of ten or twenty years ago - still holds, except for we're not just giving respect to the indie guitar heroes that were just beginning to extinguish themselves as I started writing, in early 2006.

I was thinking of "Quantum Geometry" as well - but what meaning does it have? It just sounds physics-y. Sure, that may have been my point in it, but how do we connect it to the music?

Today, when I entered the studio, the record players had been tampered with; some previous DJ, probably engaged in the art and science of beat-matching electronic music, had set the turntables to play several BPM slower. As a result, much of the vinyl I played was several BPM too slow. Much of this vinyl was stuff I typically don't listen to. As I was listening to the Verlaines, I did think, "This doesn't sound as if I remember it" but dismissed it as "it's probably a different recording than I know".

Today's show involved going into the station completely unprepared; in contrast to previous shows, where I knew what I was playing (sans requests, of course), I went through the record library and picked things that I wanted to hear at the spur of the moment. Looking at the playlist with a retrospective lens, there's a great emphasis on post-punk and its derivative forms, ranging from the subtle dance beats of the XX to "jangly" Kiwi bands who distilled Joy Division and Public Image Limited into their own home-spun brand of music, stopping in the middle to meet up with good friends Gang of Four and Swell Maps.

Without further ado...

Playlist: 3-26-2010

1. Past Lives - Paralyzer [From 2010's Tapestry of Webs] (4:00)
2. Red Sparowes - A Swarm [From 2010's The Fear is Excruciating, but Therein Lies the Answer] (7:10)
3. Wolfie - On Loan to Satellite [from 1999's Where's Wolfie]? (2:23)
4. Husker Du - Books About UFOs [from 1985's New Day Rising] (2:49) -request!-
5. Thinking Fellers' Local Union 282 - Star Trek [from 1992's Mother Of All Saints] (4:00)
6. Pavement - 5/4=Unity [from 1994's Crooked Rain Crooked Rain] (2:09)
7. The Verlaines - Death and the Maiden [From 1987's Juvenilia] (4:27)
8. The XX - Intro/VCRs [from 2009's XX] (5:04)
9. The Clean - Anything Can Happen [from the LP rerelease of Compilation] (2:38)
10. Swell Maps - Harmony in Your Bathroom [from 1979's A Trip to Marineville] (5:25)
11. Belle and Sebastian - I Could Be Dreaming [from 2009's The BBC Sessions] (3:49)
12. Interpol - The New [from 2002's Turn on the Bright Lights] (6:07)
13. Gang of Four - Anthrax [from 1979's Entertainment!] (4:20) -request!-
14. Guided By Voices - The Official Ironman Rally Song [from 1996's Under the Bushes Under the Stars] (2:48)
15. Beat Happening - Foggy Eyes [from 1985's S/T] (2:46)

In short, lots of shorter songs, and more of a move away from post-rock, shoegazing, and slowcore.

Nomenclature.

2010-03-19T20:39:00.002-04:00

I'm either going to name my show "Determinism" or "Incompleteness".

In theoretical physics, and in the philosophy of physics, a deterministic system is one where, if we see the Universe as being a bunch of mathematical equations, we can plug in a few choice parameters and determine where every atom and molecule goes in the future, given their initial momenta and masses.

I like how it sounds, more than anything - I like how lots of words from mathematics and physics sound. Additionally, I want a name that reflects that my show isn't going to be diverse: it's going to have a mission, a manifesto, a plan, to explore the depths of indie rock and not the breadths of modern music.

Incompleteness refers to the philosopher-mathematician (I love hyphenated occupations, like carpenter-chef or engineer-poet, since they give the idea that one is a "Renaissance" person. I am not certain about "drummer-songwriter" yet, though) Godel's views on the foundations of mathematics. Seeing I am a mathematician, I understand very little about Godel's theories, but what I do know is there was a dude called Peano who proposed that all mathematics came out of seven axioms, or statements that are assumed to be true with no reason. However, the big mathematical debate involved whether a finite amount of axioms could cover the entirety of mathematics; Godel said no, and hence we have the term "incomplete".

My musical knowledge is incomplete. There's so much more I will never learn about - either because I don't know it exists, or I'm just disinterested. "Incompleteness" also conveys the idea that I will be digging deep -- not traversing broad.

The other possibility is that I can think of another term from math or physics that conveys what I am trying to do on the air better than those two.

Anyway, here's my playlist for today:

1. Versus - Lose that Dress [from 1996's Secret Swingers] (3:32)
2. Yo La Tengo - Flying Lessons (Hot Chicken #1) [from 1995's Electr-O-Pura] (6:41)
3. Local Natives - Camera Talk [from 2010's Gorilla Manor] (3:45)
4. Minmae - To Edit Quickfingerz [from 2003's Le Grand Essor de la Mason du Monstre] (7:19)
5. The Fall - Hip Priest [from 1981's Hex Enduction Hour] (7:47)
6. Vampire Weekend - Giving Up the Gun [from 2010's Contra] (4:46)
7. Beulah - Lay Low for the Letdown [from Handsome Western States] (3:32)
8. Beach House - Silver Soul [from 2010's Teen Dream] (4:58)
9. Close Lobsters - Just Too Bloody Stupid [from 1987's Foxheads Stalk This Land] (3:24)
10. F*cked Up - Son the Father [from 2008's The Chemistry of Common Life] (6:32)

(1, 1, 2) 3-5-2010

2010-03-05T21:23:00.002-05:00

We got a lot of requests today, and most of the show was spent running through the record library, trying to find the requests and remember what they were at the same time as cueing up the next song.

If anything, I'm reminded that I know very little about the alt-rock tradition of Husker Du and the Minutemen - the type of thing written of in books like Our Band Can Be Your Life - besides a few songs (in the Husker Du case) and a (admittedly epic) record in the case of the Minutemen.

Anyway, today's playlist:

1. Quasi - Bye Bye Blackbird [From 2010's American Gong] (6:35)
2. Red Stars Theory - Memories For the Kind [From 1997's But Sleep Came Slowly] (10:39)
3. Oxford Collapse - John Blood [From 2008's Bits] (3:59)
4. Philco Bendyx - NYC Sunshine [from the "Soft Spot" 7"] (2:40)
5. Luna - 23 Minutes in Brussels [from 1995's Penthouse] (6:41)
6. Unrest - Suki [From 1992's Imperial FFRR] (3:33)
7. Yo La Tengo - Five-Cornered Drone (Crispy Duck) [from 1992's May I Sing With Me] (6:20)
8. Sonic Youth - Theresa's Sound-World [from 1992's Dirty] (5:29)
9. Minutemen - Jesus & Tequila [from 1984's Double Nickels on the Dime] (2:56)
10. Girls - Morning Light [from 2009's Album] (2:36)
11. Husker Du - Perfect Example [from 1985's New Day Rising] (3:17)
12. Wire - Mercy [from 1978's Chairs Missing] (5:46)

The crux of this show, in my opinion, is the Philco Bendyx track. If you were a fan of They Might Be Giants in the '90s (which I wasn't, but certainly wish I were - They Might Be Giants kicked some ass in the '90s), you'd know that John Flansbergh released singles of bands he liked on the "Hello Record Club". Philco Bendyx were one of those bands. Back in the old days, I frequented an REM forum, and I learned of this band through a mix trade, and with the exception of this site (which has awesome MP3s you should listen to), there's nothing on them on the Web, and their CDs and records look impossible to procure. So imagine what I felt to learn we had one of their singles at the radio station - I knew I had to play it immediately. The track I played was the B-side (since I was familiar with it already), but the A-side will be getting some play soon as well. Perhaps back-to-back with Charles Brown Superstar - they're a like-minded band that were hyped in the early Nineties but immediately became amazingly obscure; I'll tall you more on them in a future post.

Also, I said I would look up what 23 minutes in Brussels referred to - and apparently it's this infamous gig by seminal post-punkers Suicide. Not too far off from what I said.

I will have my show named in two week's time, and tell you about the new blog then.

Disks of the Jockeys

2010-02-27T00:22:00.003-05:00

I had my first show today. Despite culling a list of things in advance I wished to play, I must have played no more than half of those cuts. What ended up happening is that as I entered the radio station's library and started scanning the CDs and the vinyl records, I kept thinking, "I have to play this!".

Looking back at my playlist, it seems to be much more rooted in slowcore and dream pop than I would have ever planned out in advance. Three generations of the stuff - from its roots in Galaxie 500 to bands like Beach House, which add electronic elements to the existing formula - are represented, and even the non-slowcore tracks seem bleak and plodding. It only helps that we're getting a massive influx of snow here in Pittsburgh, and it's near impossible to walk the sidewalks because of the venomous combination of virgin snow and wet, melted sidewalks.

I'll be on the air on Fridays from 7 to 8 PM on WRCT. And yes, you can stream online. There are a number of wonderful shows on WRCT ranging from experimental to psychedelica to jazz to show tunes. This semester, we've done a good job eliminating dead air, and for most all reasonable hours of the day, you'll hear a live DJ. And even if I don't agree with everyone's taste, we have a crap ton of people there who love what they're doing.

Once I name my show and get it officially on the calendar, I'll be starting a new blog for it. Watch out.

Playlist for 2-26-2009:
1. Maserati - Monoliths (from 2009's Passages EP) [6:20]
2. The Wedding Present - Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft (from 1987's George Best) [4:10]
3. Low - Broadway (So Many People) (From 2005's The Great Destroyer) [7:14]
4. Spoon - Who Makes Your Money? (From 2010's Transference) [3:44]
5. Galaxie 500 - Fourth of July (from 1990's This Is Our Music) [5:35]
6. Preston School of Industry - Falling Away (From 2002's All This Sounds Gas) [3:39]
7. Girls - Summertime (From 2009's Album) [5:39]
8. Yo La Tengo - Drug Test (From 1989's President Yo La Tengo) [4:10]
9. Beach House - Zebra (From 2010's Teen Dream) [4:48]
10. Silkworm - In the Bleak Midwinter (From the comp Even a Blind Chicken Finds a Kernel of Corn Now and Then) [3:28]

As much as I rave about '90s indie rock, I realize I skipped over the whole decade! That will be fixed next week.

Jockey of the Disks

2010-02-13T01:47:00.003-05:00

I guess the big news on the music front is that I am damn close to done training to be a DJ at Carnegie Mellon's station. We're attempting a new training regime that is supposed to be more "accessible" and immediate to prospective DJs that gets you up front with the equipment from the first day. As well as attending training sessions, I have to shadow at least three DJs - so far, I've shadowed two, and once I shadow my final DJ, I'll be able to take the air test and get on the air.

I'm doing the air test next Tuesday. Perhaps the big surprise is how involved DJing is. You essentially have to log everything you do - every song you play has to be logged into an online playlist database so that listeners can see what's on the air; additionally, we have to keep logs of how air time is allotted - when we play PSAs, when we play promos, when particular DJs or talk show people are on the air. And then there's the stuff you'd expect a DJ to be doing - queueing up CDs, using the turntables, taking requests, using the mixer.

But if all goes well, I imagine I will have a show in a little over a week. If you read my posts from the past year or so - where I explore the depths of the forgotten Nineties indie rock classics - you'll get an idea of what I'm looking to do in my show. My show will be a tribute to the Matador Records, the Merge Records, the Teenbeat Records, the Touch and Go records - all the great Nineties labels that brought us all of the classic Nineties indie bands. And most preferably, the bands and labels that were on everyone's lips way back then, but you hear nothing of anymore.

I just discovered Unrest today browsing through the Teenbeat back catalog. Teenbeat, as I understand, were once as big as Matador - yet look which we remember today. This is the type of stuff I'm looking to play. A manifesto of pure pop, of guitars and pedals, of simultaneous hooks and angularity. This Unrest cut is simultaneously a sonnet to the greats of the legendary C86 compilation, and a reminder of why we don't ever want to forget the Nineties, even if guitar pop is truly a dead genre.

Anyway, more on that when that bridge gets crossed. I'll be setting up a new blog for my show, and will duly link to it.

Revisiting Good News for People who Love Bad News

2010-01-17T23:50:00.003-05:00

I am starting to realize that when Modest Mouse sold out to the mainstream with "Float On", saying that Modest Mouse had watered their sound down to bland, mainstream pop is a complete fallacy. Sure, Modest Mouse's new sound was catchier - sure, it contained more mile-a-minute hooks, more condensed songwriting, and none of those ten-minute jam sessions that tended to alienate fans - but in the end, that's all it was: a new sound.

If you search the Internet long enough you'll probably find people asking whether Modest Mouse are a Franz Ferdinand clone, or whether Franz Ferdinand are a Modest Mouse clone. I used to think this was lunacy: it was obvious that Modest Mouse have been around since the early Nineties, worked their way to the upper echelon of indie rock, and have changed their sound several times during their long career. But Franz Ferdinand, on the other hand: they are a product of our last decade, the so-called "noughts"; they were handed success on a silver plate by the British music press; they work in a fairly tight subspectrum of the diversity of indie rock as a whole.

But I claim that the person who asks whether Modest Mouse or Franz Ferdinand came first actually has a point. And that's where we get to my revelation, if we can call it that.

Good News For People Who Love Bad News - despite its panderings to Tom Waits and to Jim Jarmusch's grotesque fantasy of a New Orleans, despite its musical nods to Dixieland, to traditional American musics, to the Deep South - has its roots in the same post-punk as more trendy revivalists like Franz Ferdinand and the Editors.

What do "Float On" and "The View" have in common? It's those jarring, angular funk chords. The Modest Mouse signatures - the shouts from the back of the room, Issac Brock's sharp wit - are still there, but musically, it's more like a Gang of Four record than our beloved "Cowboy Dan".

There's a group of jolly post-punkers called Orange Juice that I want to listen to a record of sometime soon. So I went on the Intertubes and looked up what was allegedly their top-40 single in the UK, a cute one-chord ditty called "Rip it Up". And I quickly realized that, with a few changes, this might as well have been "Float On" if it were more minimal and more angular. Both songs are based on a complex funk chord, and don't change terribly much rhythmically.

The end result, I think, is, that I will be relistening to Good News for People who Love Bad News in the near future, and finally begin to appreciate the record for what it is, as opposed to what it isn't.

Return of the Pavement Clones

2009-12-13T00:05:00.002-05:00

As of recently, I've come back to the idea that bands that are derided for imitating other, more influential, bands can, on occasion, be better than the influential band.

I got the chance to listen to Yo La Tengo's first three records - Ride the Tiger, President Yo La Tengo, and New Wave Hot Dogs. For the fact that Yo La Tengo would later on go to define indie rock for a generation of indie rockers - whatever those are - they started out somewhat unsure of themselves. They had the embryo of their later sound - their combinations and recombinations of loud and soft, soft and loud, if you will - from the beginning, but where the skeleton failed to hold the developing musicians, they got support by aping the Velvet Underground. So, it could be argued that at the beginning, Yo La Tengo were merely a clone of the Velvet Underground, complete with the simultaneous leanings towards simple folk melodies and arty, abtruse noise.

Thing is, New Wave Hot Dogs is ten times better than anything I have heard by the Velvet Underground. I know; it's heresy. I should be executed, and I accept that. There's no question that the Velvet Underground are the more influential, but what Yo La Tengo did is took the formula and perfected it.

I recall talking about this way back in 2006 - more than three years ago - after excitedly buying the rerelease of Spoon's Telephono and noting how the female backup vocalist that followed Britt Daniels in those days could have passed for Kim Deal. And the template was, as every unobservant music critic following in the vein of the late Captain Obvious notes, a hybrid of Wire and the Pixies. But if you give Telephono a second spin, you'll realize: sure, it's a Pixies clone, but Spoon are doing a million things that would not happen in Black Francis' mundane, pedestrian, rockist songwriting. Again, I should be executed there - but I digress. Britt Daniels throws in unconventional rhythmic patterns, odd time signatures, abrupt and twisting song patterns - two of those straight from Wire's songbook - with effects that neither Wire nor the Pixies could have dreamed of.

There was a band called Sammy back in the middle Nineties. If you look on the Interwebs for them, you won't find much. Amazon sells their records used for a penny. There are two videos of their songs on Youtube - one from each of their records. But the few hits that come up give a decent idea of who Sammy was. Apparently they formed from the '90s noise rock act Girls Against Boys and somehow scored a major label deal at the time when all the majors were descending upon Seattle and searching for the next Nirvana. But here's the thing: they're one of those alleged Pavement clones. The two songs of theirs I have heard sound, well, like Pavement minus all the experimentation and originality. There's a Pavement member who is on record as saying Sammy is the blandest of all the bland Pavement
clones.

But somehow, that's what's attractive about bands like Sammy. For all we cry about Archers of Loaf being a Pavement soundalike, they were on an entirely different plane than Pavement ever were. Sure, there are stylistic cues on Icky Mettle straight out of Slanted and Enchanted - and sure, you could argue that there's something about the song sequencing that elicits that the Archers studied Pavement's classic song order - but the Archers are aggressive where Pavement is witty; they are hardcore where Pavement is laid back.

And it's the same with Silkworm. We tend to think of Pavement and Silkworm in the same breath - but again, they're off on different wavelengths. Silkworm, to me, seem more like the Archers of Loaf than Pavement: from their music, they both seem to be unpretentious - workingmen, if you will: islands in the sea of indie elitism.

I've been putting "Pavement Clone" into Google and seeing what bands people come up with. And even if they don't sound like Pavement, they still provide an argument that guitar-based indie rock is alive and well. I'll end this with a few of my finds. Maybe I will convince you that these bands are worth listening to.

Mass Solo Revolt: Mass Solo Revolt seem to draw from the dry, noisy, mid-90s Matador records sound. Their songs make sonic and verbal references and jabs off Silkworm's dreamy walls of guitars, Sonic Youth's angular noise, and the ping of the ride cymbal you always hear on Versus (though the latter is technically not a Matador band). There's also the very prominent '90s indie bass guitar sound, but let's save that for another post.
Minmae: Minmae seem to be the most eclectic - and the most established, with ten years of recording behind them - of the three bands I found. The songs go from more of the dry, angular, Matador-style fare to alt-country that resembles Guided by Voices rendezvouzing with the Silver Jews. I still don't hear the Pavement. Perhaps you do.
Wet Paint: Now finally, here's a band that, when they aren't pandering with TV-show-friendly quasi-emo-pop, are aping Pavement down to the vocal delivery. Out of the three, easily Wet Paint are the least memorable, but their straight-up interpretation of Pavement is certainly amusing.

Wilco... the Song

2009-05-01T12:12:00.003-04:00

I know it's old news, but I just discovered this today. Pitchfork reported yesterday on the new Wilco record, with the meta-title Wilco, the Album, which includes lead-off single "Wilco, the Song". Apparently "Wilco the Song" is as ancient as Jesus riding a brachiosaurus, as they performed it on Colbert's show several months ago. I'm giving it its third go-through right now, and all I can think is that Wilco have officially made it to the same point that Beck, Spoon, and Stephen Malkmus have successfully reached in their career; namely, the point where all your music does is reference its creator. Wilco, in that regard, have picked the perfect title for their song: I'm certain they were thinking, "We just made a song that references all of our sonic transforms... how about we name it after ourselves to show we're aware of this"?

Musically, it's like Gimme Fiction-era Spoon meets Wowee-Zowee-era Pavement, to eschew the Wilco comparisons. It's a verse-chorus pop song in the most pure structural form, with just about enough room for a bridge and a noise-and-feedback guitar solo. To return to Wilco comparisons, its form comes from Summerteeth, its rootsy sound comes from Being There, and it's washed with the accessible pseudo-experimentalism of A Ghost is Born. However, Wilco are still screwing with you - the listener of their noble blend of postmodernism - in a few ways.

First off, there are those bizarre Sonic Youth chords they throw in every once in a while, such as in the middle of the first verse. And then there's the backdrop. Does anyone else notice that Wilco are playing in front of a projection of all of their album covers, endlessly rotating in 3-D like on some sort of Apple Computer product? I can't help but think this is tongue and cheek... like the rest of this track.

End verdict? I really have high hopes for the next Wilco disc, that's slated to come out next month. I think Wilco can leave their dad-rock slump and land back in the Jim O'Rourke/Sonic Youth trifecta of postmodern rock.

Shrinking Drum Kits, The New Pornographers, and BMSR

2009-04-26T13:43:00.002-04:00

So, Pittsburgh's own Black Moth Super Rainbow came to campus last night. I could hear bits and pieces from the show from the basement in which I was playing Scrabble with some acquaintances or friends (you pick which, as that deviates long past the scope of this blog). That kind of pissed me off, since I've only heard their record once and really wanted to hear their music.

Essentially, after the opening acts - one craptastic high school Battle-of-the-bands one and one kinda like a blues-punk Deerhunter - and as the band's instruments were being soundchecked (I could see a guitar, bass, and acoustic drums, despite the record as I remember it being entirely electronic) I get a call from a friend saying that we should play Scrabble that night. I was up for it. We decided to play the game outside, citing a "half decent concert and decent weather" yet; however, the two other people we play Scrabble with, being computer science majors, demanded to play Scrabble indoors where there were electrical outlets. So, that's that.

The New Pornographers came, along with Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, last week. Our university has something that we call "Spring Carnival". Along with an actual carnival - you know, with ferris wheels and carousels and the like - the main focus of the carnival is for groups on campus (mainly fraternities and sororities, though other groups are known to participate) to build these house-like "booths" and compete against each other to see whose is best. I've only seen photos of the completed booths, having only been on the "midway" while the frats and sororities were building, but they are insanely elaborate things, complete with electrical wiring and multiple floors. At Carnival's end, we had a concert with indie rock classicists Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and the ever-steady New Pornographers.

Both of these acts come from the classic '90s tradition of indie rock, though neither of them (at least to my knowledge) put out a record in the Nineties. Ted Leo's stuff evoked if Joe Strummer fronted Superchunk and forced them to be politically conscious. Nonetheless, they were the better of the two live: they felt more like a band, more like they were in time with each other rhythmically. On the other hand, the New Pornographers often felt a bit off the beat and the presence of two keyboardists and the use of a laptop as a musical instrument added to the chaos.

However, the New Pornographers' drummer has to be mentioned explicitly, primarily because he used such a minimal drum kit to incredible results. For reference, when you typically go to a music store and look at drumkits, you'll find on the average a snare drum, a bass drum, a hi-hat, a couple crash cymbals, a ride cymbal, two or three tom-toms, and a floor tom. Sometimes you might add an effects cymbal like a splash or china (I'll be talking a bit more about splash cymbals in a future post if I remember to) or some extra percussion like a tambourine or a cowbell. This guy's drumkit had the bass, snare and hi-hat, one floor tom, one tom-tom, and only one other cymbal, a ride cymbal that wasn't even mic'd.

And then there were those excessive Eighties drummers. No idea how many drums Phil Collins has in this video, but it's more than anyone would ever bother to use. I keep thinking of this idea that drum kits have been shrinking, as argued in this discussion. It just seems more authentic to me when a band uses a smaller kit. Of course, what the hell we mean by "authenticity" is another question in itself.

I've been listening to the drum sound on Pavement's classic Slanted and Enchanted record a lot recently. Probably the drum sound that most defined Nineties indie rock, it feels compressed and claustrophobic like most post-punk drum sounds yet is more earthy than mechanical. Probably the only puzzling part of it is the fact that the cymbals come in unrealistically fast and decay extremely quickly. The interesting part about the early Pavement drum sound is that I always felt it had some strong arena-rock undertones, and likewise I always thought that Pavement's then drummer Gary Young was playing on one of those excessive Eighties kits. Learning that he too was playing this era-devining drum sound a very minimal kit does not cease to surprise me.

Explicplication

2009-02-21T13:46:00.003-05:00

I've no idea how long I've been listening to Pavement. Actually I do - having bought the expanded version of Slanted and Enchanted on Pitchfork's recommendation back in the wee months of 2003 - but the rhetorical elegance of that first sentence was hard to pass. If anything, the seeds for this post were planted close to a year ago, when, as my friend Katherine and I were working on a project for physics involving the construction of a bridge from pasta, I introduced her to Pavement, and more importantly, introduced her to their magnum opus Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.

So let's fastforward in time - now Katherine has a blog, which is really worth your patronage if you ask me. On her blog, she has written up an explication (link goes to Merriam Webster's) of the lyrics to what is perhaps Pavement's only MTV hit (remember, this is back when they played indie music) - the ironic "Cut Your Hair". A lot of my reading of this song is based upon my reading of Michael Azerrad's Our Band could Be your Life, which, though not essential as a work of prose, is essential as a documentation of the rise of "indie" ethics into a mainstream dominated by glam metal, hair bands, and power ballads. What that book only hints at, though, is the end result of this process, when all of the major labels went and converged on Seattle looking to sign seemingly any band with flannel shirts and long hair - beginning the dry, watered-down grunge-pop and nu-metal sounds of "post-grunge" as we know it.

I still haven't read her explication, which I plan to do right after I finish mine.

The lyrics will be in this font and size. The analyses will be in this font and size.

I.
Darlin' don't you go and cut your hair
Do you think it's gonna make him change?

What exactly the "hair" refers to in this song is a bit ambiguous. The contrast between long hair and short hair exists in Azerrad's analysis of the hardcore and post-hardcore scenes of the Eighties, with cutting one's hair being seen as a rite of passage into the culture. Azerrad connects long hair with the flowing prog-rock and jam-rock of the hypocritical hippie culture, and demonstrates how the hardcore punks connected it with the excess of those genres, in the quest to strip down rock and roll. Additionally, we could see the hair in terms of Eighties "glam metal" (Guns 'n' Roses, Poison, Kiss, etc...) or - most likely - in terms of the grunge movement. Invoking Azerrad's analysis of the founding of Sub Pop, the long hair of grunge was calculated, with the intent of the common appearance to create the illusion of a common Seattle scene to foriegn record buyers. Long hair was essentially associated with grunge because that was what Sub Pop wanted. What I think we have here is a grunge rocker, in grunge's dying days, debating whether to make a superficial change in appearance to remain commercially viable, perhaps even on a major label.

"i'm just a boy with a new haircut"
And that's a pretty nice haircut

Of course, this being a Pavement song, it's most impossible for Malkmus to posit a serious point without somehow invoking his serious wit. We could say here that Malkmus is speaking up for musical "authenticity" - whatever the Hell that is - by deriding the grunge rocker's choice to remain commercially viable instead of creating music for the sake of making music. I'm reminded of the days of disco - when seemingly every rock act, from Kiss to the Rolling Stones to James Brown, made a disco record in a weak attempt to stay afloat. Additionally, I'm reminded of M. Ward's new record, Hold Time; on that, he's borrowing a lot (in my opinion) from Deerhunter-esque post-punk seemingly to stay afloat in a changing indie community.

Charge it like a puzzle, hit me wearin' muzzles
Hesitate to die, look around, around, the second drummer's drowned
His telephone is found

I don't have an interpretation for these lines. The reference to the second drummer could be a meta-reference to Pavement themselves (they had two drummers), a reference to their heroes The Fall (who had two drummers), or a reference to This is Spinal Tap, where seemingly every one of the fictional band's drummers died in some freak accident. The Spinal Tap remark yields an interesting remark, as Spinal Tap were meant as a parody of Seventies' big-hair, tights-and-Spandex glam metal. Perhaps Malkmus is making the subtle connection between the commercialization of grunge and glam metal itself.

II.
Music scene is crazy, bands start up each and every day
I saw another one just the other day
A special new band

We see this routinely at the radio station. Whether it be "RIYL Sonic Youth, Guided by Voices, and Pavement" on that crappy new The Takeover UK disc some arbitrary major label sent us, or the elaborate artist bios we get sent by the big indie promoters, the labels and promoters will do whatever it takes to get us to notice their product in the sea of new music. Of course it fails. I love Malkmus' inflection on the word "special" - almost as if to show that he thinks it reeks of fail as well. It's enough to make me want to invite him to the station so he can comment on the new releases as we decide what's crap and what's not.

I remember lying
I don't remember a line
I don't remember a word

This seems to continue where the past three lines left off. Perhaps the only thing "special" about these bands is how much they sounded like Nirvana, or the Pixies, or Pearl Jam - and how much money could be made with a good one-hit wonder. Incidentially, "Cut Your Hair" itself would make Pavement a one-hit wonder in some people's eyes

At that point, is there an incentive to remember a "line" or a "word"?

But I don't care, I care, I really don't care
Did you see the drummer's hair?

III.
Advertising looks and chops a must
No big hair!!

Seems like the speaker in the song has switched from Malkmus to some arbitrary major label. By asking for "advertising looks" and "no big hair", Malkmus is commenting on a part of the music business that unfortunately exists at all levels: the fact that labels often seek bands that "look" and "sound" "trendy". Again, the big hair reference ties in post-grunge to glam metal somehow (see verse 1). This could also be a comment on so-called music "scenes" (see verse 2) themselves - that they often are the ideas of record label execs (the Sub Pop example from earlier, but also consider the Sex Pistols)

Songs mean a lot
When songs are bought
And so are you-

I think this is Malkmus' character narrating again. "Means a lot" seems to connect to the sarcastically-used "special" in verse 2; Malkmus, being Malkmus, has to open the book of wordplay again and steal from it. But this, like verse two, asks questions about what exactly musical authenticity is, and whether we can get it from major labels. There is a famous essay by superproducer Steve Albini, who gained fame playing abrasive hardcore guitar for Big Black before producing (though he prefers the term "engineering", as in his mind, the producer is not responsible for the band's creativity or lack thereof) for bands as diverse as Nirvana and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. This essay answers said question by saying that major labels suck the drive to make music from bands by placing them in debt to them financially - connecting to the lyrics yet again.

Bitch, rant down to the practice room (?)

Seemingly every lyrics site interprets the words said in this line differently. No comments.

Attention and fame so
Career, career, career....

Consensus: Back in senior-year English, we had to do similar explication to the novels we read. It was tiring and took up more time than it should have. As much as I love Pavement, writing this explication just sapped whatever creativity I had from me. Nonetheless, Malkmus provides a reference-laden, postmodern view of musical "authenticity" by examining both glam metal and post-grunge, with the long hair of both genres serving as the song's primary motif.

Smooth Jazz, Panflute Fusion, and...

2009-02-18T16:45:00.002-05:00

I find it rather amusing to look at the stuff that gets sent to the radio station at my college. Sure, we get shipped the typical indie fare from Sub Pop, Kranky, Matador, Merge, and so forth - but what makes it worth going to the station every week is seeing the stuff we get that is not worthy of our approval. Every Tuesday night, all the CDs mailed to us are emptied - along with the paper promotional extravaganzas that come with the music itself - into an old post-office crate; we go through them, one by one, deciding what stays and what, to put it lightly, is crap.

Back when I started, I observed that much of the crap was very generic indie product - this band thought they were Sonic Youth; that one thought they could sound like Morrissey and get away with it; that one took the twee-er-than-thou aestetic a bit too far and its idealistic view of life and love makes us cringe. I remember liking a lot of stuff we threw out secretly - stuff like the recent I'm from Barcelona disc, which we panned because "if we wanted that, we'd be better off listening to the Arcade Fire".

But when we came back from winter break, something happened. We started getting more and more music of genres that were not "rock" (at the radio station, "rock" includes electronic and club music for some reason) or experimental. We'd typically grab a pile of CDs from the crate and be stuck in Smooth Jazz hell for the next twenty minutes, as we tried to give each its fair listen so we could at least claim "we gave it a chance" before we pseudo-violently crammed it into the crate with the rest of the crap. What's amazing is not only could you tell the smooth jazz records from the outlandish covers, but also from the liner notes. There was one disc I remember us getting three weeks ago where the liner notes not only told some story where the gods of different religions intermingled in cosmic space, but it gave goddamn reviews of the musical content wherein the form, timbre, dynamics, and instrumentation were analyzed.

Of course, I'd think this a fluke, but then we got Panflute Fusion. And then we got the sultry voice of Vayo.

The thing about Panflute Fusion I remember is that it was a CD-R single, on a vanity label, with one three-minute song. And what made it awesome, in retrospect, is that whatever man or machine (we really can't tell) made it displayed its suckiness on the front cover. If it weren't a single, we would have kept it as a novelty record.

Vayo, on the other hand - that we did keep as a novelty record. The cover of the disc promised nineteen tangos; however, upon listening to the disc, there was not a single note of music. Essentially, each of the nineteen tracks was a spoken word explanation of one of the tangos, all done by this Vayo person in a comically bad accent.

I'm certain that the person is real, and he's taking his work seriously. But out of context, with virtually nobody at the station knowing anything about Latin music, it was enough to keep as a novelty disc. I really wish I could post some stuff from it, but the disc is at another station member's dorm for the week, as he composes a review of the disc.

their clone was better...

2009-01-23T23:21:00.003-05:00

This is a brief post in homage to a simple idea - that often, bands that got away aping other bands' sounds often are as interesting to listen to as the original bands itself.

The idea itself is based off a blog post I found randomly (do read it) last year when trying to find stuff about a band I had heard on WZBC called Silkworm. Now it must be admitted that after listening to both discs of the sadly out-of-print career retrospective Even a Blind Chicken Finds a Kernel of Corn Now and Then that the comparisons are superficial at best. At least in the Slanted and Enchanted days, both bands doled out guitar noise from the Lee Ranaldo and J Mascis school, but Silkworm's best early moments owed more to the atmospheric slowcore of Galaxie 500 than the frantic ranting of The Fall.

There were also the good-ol'-boys of Archers of Loaf during that time period as well. But where the Silkworm I've heard so far failed to sound like Pavement, the Archers of Loaf essentially come down as a more hardcore-derived Pavement.

However, where Pavement are still remembered and beloved as a cultural institution, many of these era "soundalike" acts were washed away by the tides of history. Bad metaphor aside, its truth is remarkably evident: unless I'm looking online, I can't find Silkworm and Archers of Loaf records to save my life. Finding Archers of Loaf debut Icky Mettle was a fluke from lots of used-record-bin searching, and we won't get into finding anything by Silkworm. But the end result is this: much of these Pavement clones are as interesting as the original artist, and really need to be dug back up from the crates.

Quantum Leaps

2009-01-22T22:50:00.002-05:00

In the past few days, I've been reminded by at least three unique people in at minimum three unique situations that this blog still exists. But it exists dormantly in an almost hypocritical fashion: this blog, back in the naive days in which it was created, was made as a sort of soapbox to figure out the nature of music. A place where the transfer from simple "good or bad?" judgements and claims based on unproven generalities (i.e. "All british popular music is bad") to more sophisticated analyses: why do I listen to this and not that? What is the stigma in contemporary music on guitar solos? Why did every music critic or music magazine pick the same ten releases for their top ten of '08 lists?

Yet I'm listening to more music than I ever have at any point in my life. Sure, the actual magnitude of the amount of musical sound that hits my ear is probably the same, but more and more of it is truly within my control - a technical point if anything. So with that, one would imagine, there must be some serious epiphanies about music for its own sake and music's intersection with mainstream culture.

A lot of it is the simple realization that I really am not as qualified as I want to believe to talk about music. I belong to WRCT, the radio station that broadcasts from my college's campus, and it's there that I see people who should be talking about music and philosophizing over it. It's one thing to have an opinion. Anyone can have an opinion - absolutely anyone. There are a few people I know and a plethora more people I knew that absolutely refuse(d) to listen to anything associated with their definitions of "indie rock" - saying it and its byproducts were automatically bad music without justifying the statement or listening to the "genre" with open ears. Certainly they had an opinion, and a damn strong one to be added.

But it's yet another thing to have an opinion based on a very through listening of every genre of music. And that's where things diverge. Like the people who say "nay" to indie rock, I'm basing my opinions on a very narrow listening of music - to the extent that there are many prominent bands within the genres I claim to listen to that I am completely ignorant of. There seems to be more of a tendency for people at the radio station to base their judgements on a more complete listening of the musical canon - samplings of drone, ambient, electronic, industrial, metal, classical, jazz, minimalism, so on. It's a theme I've mentioned once or twice in last year's posts - or at least believe I did - that you really can't claim to be qualified until you know a tiny bit about everything.

And that's a monumental task if there ever were one. It's simply humanity's tendency to stick towards the familiar. We know there's so much more within the world (in this case, all these genres of music), but it's quite comfortable within the world of your one genre. The bands in your genre use a musical vocabulary you can pick up on - and a musical vocabulary that will be sure to leave you baffled when you look at other genres (and not in a good way).

I don't know what the ultimate conclusion is on the blog front, though. It'll probably be as sporadic and random as it's ever been.

um...?

2008-11-03T10:56:00.002-05:00

I'm currently at college, listening to a crapload of new music every week - here consisting of two things. First off, the actual new releases; we'll talk a bit more about that in a later post, if there ever is one - and secondly, lots of bands I should have been familiar with years ago.

I spent close to a month listening to seemingly just mainstream music. The Killers, Pink Floyd, U2, and Guns 'n Roses got a crapload of play from me in late August/early September. If you're on iTunes, you get the option to connect to the iTunes of other PCs on the network that choose to share; it seemed as if everyone had the Killers, Pink Floyd, U2, and Guns 'n' Roses, and all four of those were bands that culture insists I be familiar with in order to get along with a world in which predominant tastes appear to be MOR mainstream.

But here's the scary thing: each of those four artists - though I would not convert to that camp of music - have their share of good music. You can't help but go back to the Killers' inoffensive dilution of Joy Division and New Order through Interpol. Provided you pick the right Floyd record, you can't help think they began as a band that was far ahead of their time. Provided you pick the right U2 record, you can't help think that they did a passable job combining post-punk ethic with arena-size rhythms and choruses... and can't help but be surprised that they're really a Christian band passing for normal. I can't vouch for Guns 'N' roses, though; the dichotomy between the power ballads and the big-nuts rockers is rather hypocritical (but that's another post).

Next time around we'll get to an examination of the new music.

Damn You, Pitchfork!

2008-08-13T14:27:00.002-04:00

I read a review on Pitchfork today for the Boston-based band Hallelujah the Hills, who released their most recent EP as a free download. For Pitchfork, the 7.0 rating they gave it is relatively low - but it's free music and the review made it sound like electronic nerd-pop a-la Of Montreal meets '80s-period They Might Be Giants at the local independent bookstore by focusing almost exclusively on the lyrics and the singing.

Fortunately, it's not much like that. Consider if the Arcade Fire wrote a more literate version of Funeral during their alt-country phase (see the widely-circulated 2001 demos - link does not go to a download, as many of the download links available online are dead. If you're interested, I can upload all ten demoes). Consider the psychedelic horns and wild lo-fi distortion of Neutral Milk Hotel. Consider all this distilled into seven very short baroque pop tunes that could have just as well been imported from Kevin Drew's Canada. Then it might be a bit clearer.

The songwriting's in top form and the inclusion of a live track (from a performance at the Middle East) at the end does not feel like filler. It's what free music should be - a sample of a great band (even though Pitchfork reviewed this, it was the bottommost review for today) yet to be discovered.

Download from the band's site HERE. They even give you audiophile snobs the choice between lossy and lossless. How nice is that?

Revisited: Blitzen Trapper - Wild Mountain Nation

2008-07-26T12:37:00.003-04:00

With the prospect of a new record by the Portland-based Blitzen Trapper - who just took the plunge into the world of the mainstream by signing with (relatively) major-label Sub Pop Records - it would be a good idea to look back at last year's Wild Mountain Nation. I wasn't blogging when I got hold of that record last fall (and probably for good reason - no more than two people show up here), so any ideas of writing about it them were nonexistent.

Pacific Northwest experimentalists Blitzen Trapper walk a very fine line in their 2007 release Wild Mountain Nation. Their songs totter and swerve on the boundary between familiar classic-rock and psychedelic rhythms and wild, uncompromising experimentalism – often within the same 30-second passage. What begins as a coherent song – or a mere resemblance of such – often deconstructs itself into a meterless, tempoless void: the primal ooze out of which the music we today call rock originally emerged. Even when sticking with the familiar, the band coats it – perhaps the Byrds-like guitar on the title track – with layers of lo-fi grit, atonal keyboards, drums beating as if to other rhythms, and guitar noise straight out of the Slanted and Enchanted playbook.

Blitzen Trapper’s blend of ‘90s lo-fi ethic, psychedelic country, and deconstructive art-noise is extremely strange the first time around. The Pavement comparisons that Pitchfork & Company associates with this band don’t exist at first, but inch themselves out more and more each listen. But if you’ve got no choice but to demand a comparison to Pavement, think of how they might have played Range Life if it were on a Slanted and Enchanted that was not made in the shadows of the Fall.

Even though I really liked this record, not everyone is going to warm up to Blitzen Trapper. If you’re unfamiliar with them, Pavement is a good starting point; their debut Slanted and Enchanted is one of the few historically significant records that still sounds exciting - even fifteen years after its 1993 release. Deerhoof’s The Runners Four exists on the same boundary between the familiar and the experimental, and (if you can get over the lead singer) is far more immediately rewarding listening.

Rating: 8.3/10

[edit: That's only 0.2 points away from Pitchfork's verdict of 8.5 on the same record. That is rather scary.]

P.S. If you're interested in the new record, people have been talking about the song "Furr" (also the title of the new record). Try Here (You Ain't No Picasso) to get an MP3. The new track downplays the noisy elements, boasting polished production and an actual coherent song from front to end. The noise elements of the band are downplayed and the Sixties elements really come to the foreground.

More Twee than you'll Ever Be

2008-07-22T12:17:00.003-04:00

What follows is a post on Radiohead. Yes, indeed, the contents of this blog post, entitled "More twee than you'll ever be"... yes, indeed, the same twee music of Belle and Sebastian (check out the Monty Python-esque vibe of that video), Beat Happening, and more modern experimentalists Architecture in Helsinki... concern Radiohead.

So I guess that's a warning, if you'd like to call it that.

Yesterday, I saw myself digging into the more obscure parts of the Radiohead discography. Though this is old news - the tape was posted online in 2006 - Radiohead did a series of demos under their former name, "On a Friday". Essentially, On a Friday and Radiohead differed in that On a Friday had a three-piece saxophone section (!), whereas that would never happen in Radiohead.

The On a Friday stuff is vastly different from early Radiohead. Which connects the whole twee thing to Radiohead. What's strange about the 1988 demo is that it shows that Radiohead's origins are in the twee pop movement. That makes sense, though; Radiohead were concieved as a guitar -based band. And that Radiohead changed their sound quite considerably before what we consider as their debut, the grungy "Pablo Honey"

Personally, I've always been dissappointed in Pablo Honey - as have most people who listen to Radiohead. But listening to the really early stuff puts pablo Honey into a different light. Now, Pablo Honey is not, as I might want to believe, a band trying to find their sound - the search more evident in the '88 demo - but a band that's regressing in the apparent search for mainstream success. Pablo Honey's not just disappointing anymore - it's disgusting.

What's really strange about these demos is that they eerily resemble Belle and Sebastian - a band that had not been concieved at that point in time. With "Happy Song," it's the prominent horn choruses, the sixteenth-note rhythm guitar, the bright production, and the conventional chord progression. With "Sinking Ship," it's more of a Belle and Sebastian meets R.E.M. hybrid.

The middle track, "To be a Brilliant Light," sounds more like Pink Floyd scoring a daytime soap opera and drops the whole twee thing altogether.

Do check these out - they're actually quite good.
Radiohead/On A Friday - 1988 Demos (13.44 MB, 3 tracks, 9:59)

Update: Mormons and the Mainstream; Bloc party and Physics meet Again!

2008-06-12T17:18:00.008-04:00

As you may or may not know, I'm really into WZBC, Boston College's radio station. Which itself is rather ironic - Boston College is a Catholic university, yet they have excellent radio, their DJs drawing from electronic, dance, indie rock, post-rock, noise, doom metal, and art music. Most of the time you get all of these genres within one hour of listening.

So now, because of them, I just got into this band called the Retribution Gospel Choir. Which itself is also ironic - the overtly christian content of this band is the same as the overtly christian content of WZBC. It's essentially guitar-driven indie pop from the Mormon guy who leads the glacial-moving "slowcore" (who comes up with these genre names?) band Low.

So that's it. I'm trying not to fall into the abyss that is mainstream music. Someone that I know got me into the Killers and after listening to it a few times I (I will burn in hell for saying this) sort of liked it. For the fact that they are allegedly a manufactured band - no sources for this one, it's just what Somebody Told Me [do mind the skip at 0:40] - and that they border on Vegas Emo without actually being emo - their songs are quite sophisticated in their structure. And you'll get them stuck in your head... just like the suits want you to do.

The last part of this post is a continuation of a previous post about Bloc Party. It's very interesting that, just as my physics teacher played "Silent Alarm" on the first class, he decides to play "A Weekend in the City" in one of his last classes. Of course, I only got to hear a couple tracks from the record; later on, the music was switched to this rather cheesy classic rock that sounded like an imitation of itself (Stevie Ray Vaughn, I later learned)

Muxtape?

2008-05-03T21:27:00.002-04:00

Respect is Due now has a Muxtape...

Which means, in simple English, that I can create a rather accessible mix of music and post it accessibly on the Interwebs.

Sounds very great as a concept, but when you actually get to creating your page and uploading your music, there's lots of hurdles to jump. No more than 12 tracks, no more than 10 megabytes per file, MP3 only.

But it's still music nonetheless... What's on there now is the bastard child of a mix I made earlier in the year. The concept of the mix was songs that I listened to independently of the album they came from. Songs where I would never listen to anything from the rest of the record anymore but this one song. Or two songs... or three... or some integer value on the open set of integers.

The conclusion to the post on conformist sheep and indie rock will come, but who knows when.

Conformist Sheep and Indie Rock, Part 1

2008-04-30T17:23:00.002-04:00

Today, it's story time.

In that vein, let's talk briefly about the Decemberists - and, while we're on this path, Sufjan Stevens.

The reason I know of or listen to either of those two artists is due to my friend in Pittsburgh, the one who influenced me to start this blog two years and some odd days ago. She told me about Sufjan and sent the CD, to which I listened. A similar thing happened with the Decemberists, though she told me first that she didn't much like the Decemberists. On a musical level, both are great stuff with a few caveats attached. The Decemberists are rather derivative, pulling equally from the Beatles and Neutral Milk Hotel. Sufjan Stevens spends too much time whining about Jesus and family values. But both have their moments and have come out with very solid records.

But let's examine it from a social level.

Almost a year ago - perhaps eight or nine months ago - I found myself asking why I even bothered to continue listen to the Decemberists instead of listening to them a few times and dismissing the record off as something "interesting". Eventually I came to the answer that "I’ve had to listen to the Decemberists because I have to." In other words, I brought it down to a question of society.

At that time, everyone whom I've met who seemed to be into any sort of indie rock was into the Decemberists. The trend started sometime in tenth grade and continued well into today. I've found that by being familiar with them (while still genuinely enjoying their music... don't use that argument to me) is merely a way to make connections with people - to conform, you can say, to the herd.

Perhaps this would be better explained by a contrast. Let's contrast the three following statements:
Statement 1: I listen to the Decemberists.
Statement 2: I listen to Wolf Parade.
Statement 3: I listen to Colin Newman.
If, hypothetically, some arbitrary person were to compare these three statements, probability would tell us that people would respond best to statement one. They'd probably react more negatively to statements two and three, probably even (as in my experience) judging the bands before they even bothered to listen to them. They'd think that as the person listenes to "weird" music, [s]he must be some sort of elitist who will make fun of me. Or something like that.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that as much as we'd like to think our choices in music are reflections of ourself, they really are reflections of the society around us. As music becomes a purely social activity, it becomes more important to relate to people around you than alienate yourself with good music.

It's an interesting idea... if it makes sense, that is.

The part 2 hinted at in the title will continue to develop this idea a little further by commenting about what bands have reached this "conformist sheep" status.

On the Existence of "Emo" - part two

2008-04-25T18:48:00.003-04:00

I had another post on the nature of "emo" in the works. About whether a such thing as "emo" exists or if it is indeed a creation of the mainstream media. About an occurance this morning that was ironically hypocritical. But let's put that on hold, along with the Allman Brothers post and all that good stuff.

But speaking of emo and the mainstream media, this article's [link] a bit old, but it's essential reading. It's essentially a TV newscast's "explanation" of emo to scared parents who are eager to buy into wide, sweeping generalizations.

Some quotes out of it:

"Part of the guiding philosophy of emo kids is pain"
"Happiness is a sin to emo culture. In a state where the number two cause of teen death is suicide, experts say parents need to know emo culture and understand it. "
"One site instructs, dye your hair black. Style it in the gunshot wound and never be happy. "

Making things even worse, it's called "Emos Exposed". Yes, that's the name of the article. But as anyone with even the smallest bit of intelligence would ask, what is there to "expose," as you put it?

But this is, in a way, exactly the story I said I was going to postpone. Just in the convienent form of, uh... what should I call it?... "Journalism."

I attended a workshop today (loooong story) about, to quote verbatim, "Deconstructing Cliques". The idea they were trying to teach us is that we had to look beyond superficial things like race, fashion style, socioeconomic class, and appearance in grouping ourselves at school. The first thing we did was analyzed various so-called subcultures that might exist in Hollywood's Token High School. You know the type as much as anyone else - The Breakfast Club would not have been made if the dynamics between these archetypical groups did not exist. Nerds, Geeks, Thugs, "Weirdos", preps... and then emos.

The lady who was teaching the workshop had only vaguely heard the term emo, so she had some students describe it for her. Eventually, she got the gist of the comments and was able to... at least in her mind... extrapolate about emo kids - that is, if they even exist.

"So we have emo kids, who basically never look happy..."

But I imagine you see the glaring irony. It's a workshop about overcoming stereotypes and she's creating her own stereotypes. Which may or may not exist.

I'm certain someone could argue that she was just trying to see how we judged different groups that were not "our own" (whatever that is), but there was still an element of hypocrisy there.

Now... let's turn back to something less rooted in reality - that being music.

No, Pavement is NOT an emo band.

2008-04-22T17:32:00.003-04:00

Last week, I got the opportunity to try to get someone I kind of sort of know into Pavement. We listened to the first disc of the fantastic rerelease of Crooked Rain Crooked Rain - all eighty minutes of it in one sitting.
By the time we get to "Stop Breathin'" I am told that Pavement reminds this person of a band that she likes. I forgot the name until later. I probably would have forgotten the band's name had I not been reminded again of it later on.
So I listened to her band - some band called The Honorary Title. Now, with my knowledge of people's comparisions of sound to that of Pavement, it should have been obvious that this band would sound nothing like Pavement. Pitchfork compared Tapes 'n' Tapes and Blitzen Trapper to Pavement: Tapes 'n' Tapes owed far more to Wolf Parade and the Arcade Fire than to Malkmus and Friends; Blitzen Trapper owed more to psychedelic rock and its stoner jams.
Guess what. The Honorary Title are a god-damn emo band. They're really diluted in the same way that The Fray made a killing diluting Coldplay's already low-molarity solution into one of a far lower concentration. You know the type of band they are. You're watching some show on network TV - some show about beautiful young people in a beautiful but expensive city, doing the superficial things that beautiful rich people do - and suddenly the ubiquitous emo song plays. You know, to show that somehow, the producers have taste in music that is better than yours will ever be and you should bow down to that. This band could easily score that moment - no questions asked.
The moral here: Pavement is not an emo band. And they never have been, and never should you interpret their music as such. There's a guy I know who would be... wait, was... laughing at this story - he thought it was a logical conclusion - that it was inevitable that someone would tell me to listen to some emo band.

Who knows?

2008-04-14T16:08:00.004-04:00

I mentioned an Allman Brothers related post last time around. It's certainly a good idea, seeing there is that rather strong parallel between Malkmus and jam bands; it would serve as a great segue. But that post is nowhere near conception. Chinese Democracy will be out before...

...wait, Chinese Democracy is apparently close to being released - or so they say...

...Duke Nukem Forever will be out before Respect is Due covers the Allman Brothers and the Southern Jam Band Complex. Which would be a shame - the music tastes here in the South are, er... fascinating and would make for some great analysis.

I just got a ton of new music. 'tis unfortunate, though, that the bulk of it is mainstream music. Yes, it's some of the better mainstream music, but it's mainstream music nonetheless.

Black Sabbath, though, really surprised me. Paranoid (the record, not the song) sounds a lot like Gaffney's contributions to Sebadoh (sepecially those on III) if they only were mellower and trippier instead of focusing on the juxtapositions Gaffney emphasized between country twang and Satanic death growl (one review I read compared it to GWAR - how true!)

I'm currently listening to a stream of the new Tapes 'n' Tapes record - after Pitchfork butchered it with their 5.9 rating, I really need to see whether producer Dave Fridmann really messed it up as Pitchfork claims. So far I think the production work's decent, if not a little bland and generic. I have no idea how much longer it'll be up, so were I you, I'd listen to it now.

Speaking of the Malkmus bonus tracks...

2008-03-25T19:03:00.003-04:00

If anyone happens to be interested, I'm putting them up.

I've been thinking a lot about resequencing Real Emotional Trash - mostly getting rid of the crap song(s?) and putting these two tracks in some appropriate place.

Hopscotch Willie really needs to go - there's something in it that reminds me of the Allman Brothers (we'll get to them more in a future post... I'm planning a whole post on jam bands).

Anyway, here's the Malkmus tracks (along with two more tracks Matador threw in later on). They're rather high bitrate and in ZIP format.
Stephen Malkmus - Real Emotional Trash bonus tracks

Tweedy v. Malkmus

2008-03-24T14:58:00.003-04:00

I've been listening to the new Malkmus record a lot recently. Regardless of what the elitists at Pitchfork say, it's rather good. But then, Pitchfork have a history of hating records that have lengthy classic rock-style guitar solos - just look to their wrongly-directed review of Wilco's A Ghost is Born, a record which, contrary to Pitchfork, is only made better by all those guitar solos in the first half.

But then, to think of it, the two records - the Wilco and the Malkmus - have yet another similarity. Both of them feel as if they were originally two separate records that were mixed in together at the last moment. A Ghost is Born is only fifty percent jam rock; there's a concise, hook-filled pop record somewhere in the record's second half.

Real Emotional Trash is the same. There is the Grateful Dead-style stoner trad-rock [[Dad-rock?]] that everyone's been discussing. But between the long stoner jams, there are an number of shorter pop songs that seem to continue off where Face the Truth ended. "We Can't Help You" could have fit in after "Post-Paint Boy" and "Cold Son" could have replaced "Loud Cloud Crowd." Or something like that. In effect, the only shortcoming of the new record is that it should have been two records... and for all we know, that might be why we come back to it in five years' time.

To make things even more interesting, if you look in the liner notes, Malkmus thanks Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. Interesting...

If you've heard the bonus tracks that Matador released if you preordered the record, it only makes sense (I've seen them floating around the Web, too). The two bonus tracks continue in the pop vein of the record, and feel like a bridge between his earlier work and his present work.

Life before Radiohead and the Super Bowl

2008-02-04T15:14:00.000-05:00

It turns out that before Radiohead, Thom Yorke was in a band called the Headless Chickens, who recorded apparently only one song, entitled "I don't want to go to Woodstock". Which I found somewhere on teh intarwebz and subsequently listened to.

It's fascinating to look at the development of Radiohead-related projects. This song, recorded in the late '80s, is a three-chord shoegaze track with a very distorted guitar sound - reflecting the trends in indie music of the late '80s. Of course, as we all know, when Radiohead broke through with "Creep," they were classified within the post-grunge movement - also the trend at the time. Though the band(s) merely follow(s) trends at this point, the Headless Chickens track is a very good listen - it's too bad they didn't break through, as they would have been a good pop band with a unique edge in their incorporation of two violinists.

Of course, we all know that Tom Petty headlined the halftime show last night... but after the commercial break following the performance of Petty's final adult-contemporary tinged country-rock song, there was a jarring surprise. The telecast opened up broadcast of the second half of the game with, of all things, an Arcade Fire song.

Now I don't watch football, so it was rather coincidental that I was in front of the television at that exact moment... which, apparently, Pitchfork have written about with an enviable amount of sarcasm here. It turns out that there's some sort of legal issue. FOX didn't obtain permission for broadcasting the bit of "No Cars Go" (the last part of the Neon Bible version, I believe)... we'll have to see what ensues.

It reminds me of how back in New England, the sports radio station would occasionally broadcast bits of Pavement songs before cutting to the next inning of a Red Sox game. And how NPR often plays bits of more AC-oriented indie artists (Wilco, Sufjan Stevens) between segments on their newscasts.

Physics, Silent Alarm, and Dancing

2008-01-24T18:19:00.000-05:00

My new physics teacher was playing a bit of Bloc Party's Silent Alarm when I entered physics class today. Which reminded me that the argument that this blog came out of had to do with whether Jenny Lewis was, to paraphrase, as mainstream as Bloc Party.

Nonetheless, I had no choice but to go back and relisten to Silent Alarm when I got home. I've realized that I've neglected and underrated this record - perhaps because it's an example of the stuff they call top 40 in Britain.

Though the tempos show little variation and the drums sound undoubtably processed and manufactured (thanks, Protools!) there are some great songs. To say it hearkens back to British post-punk like Wire and Gang of Four is overstatement - even though you can dance to it (which is probably the only thing you can and should do with this record) it sounds contemporary rather than retro.

On the topic of what we can and can't dance to, what about songs that you could dance to but, because of the morbid subject matter - or perhaps simply because you'd be the only person on the dance floor - you really shouldn't dance to?
Much of the Arcade Fire's stuff falls under this heading.
As does a lot of Wire's stuff, especially on Pink Flag.
The same goes to The Fall - you'd look rather awkward dancing to their beats.
There are also lots of danceable post-rock passages - the end of "Sleep" on Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven, for example. But who'd want to sit through the buildup to the climax?

Where next?

2008-01-09T17:05:00.000-05:00

What's amazing is that there is still so much musical territory left to cover, whether in "indie" or elsewhere.

When you look at the world of music around you and realize the hole you've dug yourself into, be it bad emo music you justify listening to merely because it's "post-hardcore" (so you say...) or post-punk or avant-noise or whatever, it gets scary to look around at what you've never listened to.

For me, that "what I've never listened to" is a huge sea of music. Off the top of my head, I want to get into early '90s math rock... '80s hardcore... mainstream and classic rock... freak folk... the plethora of varieties of metal that don't sound much different from each other... jazz, free jazz, jazz fusion. And I'm certain that this statement applies to everyone. We are all tied up in our musical cubbyholes and to expand into uncertain territory is difficult. We like what we know we like - even if we like what we like because of a fluke or risk into uncertain territory. I got into Modest Mouse back in 2001 by taking a risk, and The Moon and Antarctica changed how I listen to music.

I got into Sublime over the summer and spent quite a few humid nights in Pittsburgh listening through 40 Oz. to Freedom. I always had a disdain for Sublime... perhaps it was those NK stoners (we are... NK! We are... NK!) who overglorified the band's status to deities - in summation, they felt overhyped in comparison to the singles you might hear on the modern rock radio. But I gave them a listen with open ears.

When talking about Sublime, it's important to note that Sublime are simply the ska equivalent of Pavement - especially on that early record, where they use style in only the way that a postmodernist might. And that's what surprised me about them - they were doing nothing that Pavement hadn't. Of course, there's no way that you're going to blast Wowee Zowee at a party (unless it's an art opening... that's a different story), but both bands share the same energy. The same irreverence.

Oh... and Pitchfork just said today that Radiohead's set to play Charlotte. Too bad it might not happen until I'm off to college.

The Year of Mainstream Indie

2008-01-05T12:50:00.000-05:00

I began responding to a comment and got carried away a bit... so now it's a post.

"not much good music was made in 07. just the mainstream indie stuff"

To respond:
2007 was the year of mainstream indie. The Arcade fire's on seemingly every other best of. It's getting harder and harder for a band to stay under the radar - somebody, be it Gossip Girl (Sea Wolf), pitchfork (Blitzen Trapper), film exposure (Kimya Dawson) so on so on... is bound to hear you and deem you the next best thing.

Understand that this process has been in the making since the beginning of the decade. The Strokes were the original buzz band and everything else follows in their footsteps. We're just seeing more and more and more buzz bands and we're seeing those buzz bands take on something more akin to an "indie" look as opposed to the more mainstream rock-derived look of the Strokes and the White Stripes. And these buzz bands come more and more and more towards the heart and core of what is "real" indie and take the real and make it mainstream through exposure. Precisely what's happening with Kimya Dawson if she makes it big. Anti-folk won't necessarily be some "obscure" sounding genre. But it won't propagate through MTV or the radio either - that's interestingly done very well through word of mouth, real or virtual.

However, there are a few good radio stations out there that play some amazing stuff. Boston College's WZBC is pretty straightforward indie, with lots of post-punk and art music thrown in for good measure. They did a great retrospective of Dan Bejar's side project Destroyer last night that made me realize I need to listen to him more. Carnegie Mellon has good radio too, though it veers more on the post-rock and shoegazer side of things.

Best of '07

2007-12-31T18:17:00.000-05:00

Honestly, I shouldn't be doing a best of 2007 when, as of my last count, I've only gone through 12 2007 records fully enough to have any definite opinions. 11 of which are actually eligible.

The brief pseudo-reviews are primarily works in progress. And they will probably always be - even when it's 2050 and we've all died due to global warming.

I'm also working on a brief, pseudo-intelligent "analysis" of the intersection of music and culture in 2007. There are two specifically interesting points, the "mainstreamification" of indie through the media and the ever-so-timely resurgence of protest music. For a time in the early summer, everyone who wanted to look cool (and perhaps follow Green Day's lead?) was releasing a protest song; for God's sake; even nu-metal mainstays Linkin Park had one, with trite humanitarian imagery in the background of its music video, raising the question, "well, what do they do for the world besides sing about its problems?"

Best of '07

01. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.
Facing more mainstream attention than ever, Spoon show that they can still create under pressure from the mainstream. The record sounds like a combination of the tempos and rhythms (rhthms?) of their Wire-Meets-Pixies debut Telephono filtered through each of their later records in succession. What I thought to be a collection of relaxing pop tunes at first proved to be a multifaceted record of tightly-constructed pop tunes.
Rating: 90

02. Deerhunter - Fluorescent Grey EP
Coming out of seemingly nowhere, Deerhunter gained massive success due to two favorable Pitchforkmedia reviews. Which Deerhunter deserve. The band combines the repetitive nature of post-punk with washed out soundscapes straight out of Brian Eno's book.
Rating: 88

03. Do Make Say Think - You, You're a History in Rust
A very surprising post-rock record indeed. I had the opportunity to see these guys live and they are far better live than on record - and with a solid studio effort behind them, that's saying a lot. Live, the music has an intensity that the studio recordings lacks entirely - Executioner's Blues, when performed live, rides on a very thin rope between organization and pure anarchy.
Rating: 87

04. Radiohead - In Rainbows
Unfortunately, Radiohead have met most of the hype and expectation that has grown about them recently. In Rainbows is in no way innovative - for the first time in their career (wait... what about Pablo Honey?) the band fall into a sort of comfort zone, guided by the achievements of others. The beats are tight and repetitive, often reminiscent of a marching band with Mark E. Smith of The Fall as the bandleader and Deerhoof as the color guard.
Rating: 84

05. Okkervil River - The Stage Names
Like the Arcade Fire, Okkervil River create highly melodramatic symphonic folk music. However, Okkervil River do it much better. The trite Springsteen references are still there, but this record gets extra points for its postmodern take on the idea.
Rating: 81

06. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Some Loud Thunder
Though panned by the media (mostly), I think this highly underrated sophomore attempt holds up. Perhaps because of our expectations of bouncy West-coast style indie pop from this New York band we are disappointed by their foray into '70s-influenced art/progressive rock. Perhaps some day we will realize what value this record has.
Rating: 79

07. Blitzen Trapper - Wild Mountain Nation
Blitzen Trapper play with genre in the same way that a visual artist may play with color or line. Though they sound nothing like Pavement, they have the same postmodern irreleverence (perhaps that explains the comparisons), switching from psychedelia to noise to country and back within the course of 30 minutes.
Rating: 77

08. Rob Crow - Living Well
Though I prefer his work with Pinback, Rob Crow creates some decent stuff solo. Crow blends indie harmonies with metal influences, creating darker and tighter stuff than on the Pinback records.
Rating: 75

09. Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity
Honestly, it's hard for Deerhoof to top their 2005 masterpiece The Runners Four. Instead of trying to recreate the quirky blues/rock/noise/whatever charm of that record, Deerhoof try to become serious in Friend Opportunity. Which means lots of electronics and a few melodramatic teary ballads. Deerhoof released an EP of free stuff on their website in September (which I can't seem to find online anymore!), whose complete disregard to any sort of form shows that Deerhoof might come back to the irreverence we love.
Rating: 69

10. The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Forget the hype. Though Win Butler and company try to get political and relevant with this record, the end result, though relevant to our world at many times, seems musically trite and overproduced. Simply stated, Neon Bible is what would result if Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan met some ‘80s post-punk musicians and an out-of-work string quartet in a Seattle coffee shop and decided to impulsively cut a record. Perhaps the Decemberists' Colin Melloy was at that coffee shop too - I don't know.
Rating: 66

Mixes Never Made

2007-09-01T21:17:00.000-04:00

The only real bad thing about creating a lot of mix CDs - wait a second there; they're in MP3 form - ok, compressed digital media that functions in the same way a mix tape or CD would have in those Days of Yore - is that I have so many unused mixes loitering about my iTunes playlists.

Here are a couple of them and some brief comments:

February 11, 2007
1. Deerhoof - The Perfect Me (2.40)
2. Gastr Del Sol - Black Horse (5.24)
3. Sun City Girls - Iced Off Broccoli (0.32)
4. Sunset Rubdown - Snakes Got a Leg III (3.52)
5. Wilco - At Least That's What You Said (5.33)
6. Guided by Voices - Big Chief Chinese Restaurant (0.56)
7. The Fall - Hip Priest (7.47)
8. Sebadoh - Limb by Limb (2.17)
9. Sigur Ros - Ny Batteri (8.10)
10. Jim O'Rourke - Insignificance (5.11)
11. Modest Mouse - Dark Center of the Universe (5.03)
12. Tapes 'n' Tapes - Cowbell (2.33)
13. Loose Fur - Liquidation Totale (5.37)
14. The Olivia Tremor Control - Hideway (2.34)
15. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Antennas to Heaven (18.57)
16. Pavement - Mussel Rock (Is a Horse in Transition) (3.26)
Pretty much, I wanted to create a mix that began with that Deerhoof song and ended with that Pavement song. I was into the idea at that time of constructing mixes around short interludes of one minute or fewer, an idea I got from a really great Sun City Girls record called "Static From the Outside Set". Sebadoh's eclectic "III" also was a factor - I liked how on that record you never knew what was next or what genre Gaffney was going to steal from for his postmodern psychedelic stews of compositions or whether the next song would be whiny proto-emo Barlow or death-metal-grunting Gaffney.

Charlotte NC, August 18, 2007
1. Spoon - My Mathematical Mind (5.02)
2. Low - Like a Forest (2.27)
3. Sonic Youth - Hey Joni (4.23)
4. Arcade Fire - Un Annee sans Lumiere (3.43)
5. Olivia Tremor Control - Dusk at Cubist Castle (7.35)
6. Caterpillar - Somnamubulistic (3.12)
7. Mogwai - Kids Will be Skeletons (7.27)
8. Wilco - Spiders (Kidsmoke) (10.46)
9. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Mama, Won't You Keep Them Castles up in the Air and Burning? (4.27)
10. Pavement - The Sutcliffe Catering Song (3.22)
11. Silver Jews - Advice to the Graduate (3.18)
12. Jim O'Rourke - Bad Timing (9.59)
13. Beck - Fume (4.29)
I did this mix after listening to a college radio station based up in Boston and being awed at how the DJs there would integrate these ten or twenty minute noise, folk, and avant-garde pieces into a playlist of otherwise obscure but catchy as hell-yet-makes-you-go-WTF indie pop. So adding the longer and.or more ambient pieces into an otherwise conventional set came from there.
Interestingly, I keep a list of songs on my iTunes library I've heard on the radio. I plan to make a mix about those in the future...

Symphonic Grime with Drum Corps

2006-12-17T18:56:00.000-05:00

Pitchfork just put out a MP3 of a song from Deerhoof's soon-to-be new record, Friend Opportunity.

I remember a few months back, the band was describing the record as "symphonic grime with drum corps". And hearing the first few seconds of this song - which not only had drum rolls which Pitchfork described as "threatening to get John Philips Sousa on us" but also had a very bright-sounding... horn section. Yes, deerhoof using a horn section.

Other than that, the song sounded typically Deerhoof, although the production was far cleaner than on The Runners Four. Everything sounded amazingly crisp and sharp - everything attacked me.

But I know Deerhoof as a lo-fi band, and thus I know them for... uh... their lo-finess. I am uncertain as to whether this is a positive or a negative sign for my beloved Deerhoof.

But at least I can understand the "symphonic" part and the "drum corps" part. The "grime" part of that statement, though, we have left to decipher. I don't hear any rapping in this new song.

Well, it's something actually which I can look forward to.
Or, for the gramatically obsessed, something to which I can look forward.
There's a good Winston Churchill quote that shows the absurdity of that preposition "rule"...

-Aaron

To what was I listening?

2006-10-23T22:44:00.000-04:00

Finally I had a chance to hear the rerelease of Sebadoh's III today.

And I want to ask: what type of drugs were they on when they wrote that? Either that or Barlow and Co. have a very warped sense of humor.

The record ends with a seven-minute track that juxtaposes the whiny country-twanged voice of Barlow with some post-hardcore screaming.

I'm sort of at a loss for words here... simply that it was a very strange listening experience, and that if anyone's actually reading this, they should do the history of indie rock a favor and pick this record up.

For if you say to me, "I'm an indie rock person" - but you can't tell me anything about Robert Pollard, about Isaac Brock, about Stephen Malkmus, about Britt Daniels, about J Mascis, about the Friedbergs, about Jeff Magnum, about Athens... Montreal... Vancouver... Chicago... Dayton, Ohio... I will then ask, "well, than, what are you?"

(above is probably the snobbiest thing I have ever written here. I remember beginning this blog with the idea to boldface all namedrops in an attempt to make fun of indie snobbery... the idea of me knowing more obscure musical references than thee... and here I sit, writing the hateful words of INDIE SNOBBERY. saying my music has a sanctity, a holiness, a purity that YOURS DOES NOT.

I guess that's what happens when you're the only person whom you know that listens to good music.

You lose any logical grounds. You look at the preppy-looking kid next to you, and think, what's on his(her) Ipod? Nothing good. Abba... [what's he doing with that?] Ben Folds... Hawthorne Heights... [how can anyone listen to this?] Lil' Jon... [both extremes... slit your wrist and get crunk at the high school football game, party, seventeen girls for every guy... side-by-side] Britney Spears... [I thought those people were one-hit wonders] WHERE'S THE REAL MUSIC? )

I am not afraid of this review...

2006-10-06T19:15:00.000-04:00

Instead of ranting about how teenage behavior is explained by the Periodic Table of the Elements (which, in fact, is true) I'll try to review Yo La Tengo's new record today. Emphasis on the word try.

If you want me to be honest, the last decent record the Jersey threesome has put out was the precision-focused Electr-O-Pura. Unlike the sloppy, confused experiments that followed in the form of I can Hear the Heart Beating as One and And Nothing Turned itself Inside-Out (I've not heard Summer Sun or any of the other EPs/side projects put out during that time), this record's drony ambient pop soundscapes were not only consistent, but well-written.

That statement will now change with I am not Afraid of You and I will Beat your Ass, a record of such high creativity that its music will indeed beat your ass and leave you without breath.

I have always hated records that tried to explore every existing musical genre - with the exclusion of the Clash's Sandinista!. Most genre-breaking records are far too ambitious and cover too much territory to be solid efforts. Although YLT's new record falls within those criteria, it is filled with great songwriting and enough drony guitar jams to satisfy anyone who prefers the older YLT.

The record falls into a slump with a clump of overly sentimental ballads towards the beginning and an overlong ambient soundscape in the middle. However, with those exceptions, Yo La Tengo's new record is a step in the right direction and worth your purchase.

My rating: 8.7/10

Briefly, an explanation of the rating scale I plan to use if I ever review more records:

9.0-10.0: A religious experience
8.0-8.9: Solid, great record
6.0-7.9: Worth checking out
4.0-5.9: Unoriginal, poorly-executed, lack of focus, mediocrity...
0.0-3.9: You should be embarrassed to own this record.

2006-09-29T21:41:00.000-04:00

I just got The Loon by Tapes n Tapes, but of course I have not listened to it.

That means I have four CDs sitting there, unlistened.

Sort of off topic, but what's the chance I'm going to find people in real life who listen to the type of stuff I listen to? I know, I should do what I want, not what they want, so on, so on, so on.

If my goal in life was to meet people, then I'd probably listen to that "Southern Rap" crap that every radio station down here plays. You know, We in da club, we smokin' weed, I got more girls than the emperor of China, I got more girls than are in the Carolinas... so on, so on. Not because I like it, but because it was a social necessity.

Are the people who actually listen to Southern rap driven to do it by social necessity, or do they actually like it? Even with my bias against all rap music, this Southern rap stuff is an atrocity upon the face of music. Simple enough. Life is not a party. Life is not a party. The drugs don't flow like water and the women don't come easy...

Another thing I can't stand about the genre is the rapper's inability to follow the most simplistic laws of grammar - to form complete sentences and conjugate the most simplistic verbs.

An example: We in da club. This sentence is NOT complete; it is missing the verb are.

But I probably shouldn't judge the music on that technicality; even Brit Daniels of Spoon misconjugates verbs. For example, in "Was it You?" he opens with: We was walking through the park.

Anyway... what was my point in writing this?

Irony Explained in Laymen's Terms

2006-09-06T15:28:00.000-04:00

*digression into real life begins *

Two of the most blatant examples of irony I have heard in the past week:

1. Being told by your parents that the best thing to do when on the phone with someone is to complain about your parents
2. Being told about your parents to complain about homework on the phone with someone instead of actually doing it.

I'll let these statements stay in their general form; no names, no explanation of the how and wherefore of these statements.

*digression into real life ends*

When I moved to Charlotte, I was first concerned about not having any good record stores...

But I found possibly the coolest little indie record store... OK, it's not Amoeba Records, but as Charlotte's not a college town, this place exceded what I expected from Charlotte.

More about it next time.

If you have not yet,

2006-09-05T17:51:00.000-04:00

Go out and buy the already month-old rerelease of Spoon's Telephono (And prepare to laugh).

It's amazing to think that such a great band began as a minimalist Pixies knock-off. The record is sequenced such that it begins with its most Pixies-like song and then delves into more experimental territory that Frank Black would never even think of. I don't think Frank Black would do a song in 5/4, ever. Ever.

Black's been making country records for a while now, I believe. During the drive to North Carolina, there was an interview with a songwriter popular in the '60s (whose name I forget) on PBS, where he was promoting a new record he made. Pretty typical alt.country stuff, I remember. But he had managed to gt some of "Nashville's best session musicians," including - guess who - Frank Black.

I don't think that Britt Daniels would make a country record. That's probably the tradeoff; never see a Frank Black song in 5/4, never see Spoon do a country song.

Anyway... the first song on the record is so much like the pixies that I couldn't help but laugh at the blatant musical history references. Quiet verse, loud chorus. The female backup singer sort of reminds me of Kim Deal, even.

...off to real life again - things have just got interesting over there.

Brief Thoughts on Popular Music

2006-07-31T11:04:00.000-04:00

Ah, yes, it's time for another rant on the state of music. What fun...

I would have thought that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were confined to the traditional classic-rock mentality of my high school, where many of the students’ musical tastes are based on people old enough that their parents or grandparents could have been fans back in the day they were popular. But of course, that’s not the case. Having gone to Attleboro, Massachusetts (I won’t bother with reasons to make this entry far quicker), I was subjected while there to a mix CD containing the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ greatest hits, all the way from Blood Sugar Sex Magic to By the Way. What torture to listen to…

I have come up with two reasons based exclusively on the Peppers’ music and songwriting, that I think explain well their popularity.

Number 1: Their music is very catchy. Of course, you can get an earworm listening to Guided by Voices, but the Peppers provide you with one of the most severe earworms you can get. Six days after hearing the greatest hits compilation, the hooks of “Around the World” – both the rapped verses and the sung chori (that would be the proper plural for chorus, right?) – are still floating around my head, bouncing around, with no signs of leaving.

Number 2: Their songs all sound similar. Even after more than 15 years in the business, they are a one-idea band, sort of like the White Stripes (although the Stripes are beginning to outgrow their one-ideaness). There essentially is not much difference between “Give it Away Now,” “Around the World,” and “Dani California”. “Around the World” and “Dani California” are practically the same song – both loaded with geographical references, both with rapped verses and sung chori, and both at the same tempo.

Some people like to see bands in a constant shape of evolution, but I’d imagine the number who do is few, seeing how pop vocalists have been singing the same song, albeit with musical treatments that echo the time which the song was made in, since at least the days of boy bands. Probably the only difference I can think of between the ballads of Marc Anthony and Kelly Clarkson is the person who sings the ballads.

What I guess I’m trying to so-eloquently say is that people don’t really want new and innovative music; they just want familiar music based on a formula that makes them feel comfortable. And they want their hooks, and they want them fast. Pop music is a situation where computer software now exists that can determine whether a song will be a hit.

And the Chili Peppers, however you might perceive them, fit all those criteria.

Some Sentences on Sufjan Stevens

2006-07-25T21:48:00.000-04:00

I have found it difficult to write in the past month... it feels as if there is nothing to say. Which is strange, as I've been listening to music at a break-neck... OK, I will remove the cliche... rapid pace over the past month.

I do, though, have a comment on the indie-becoming-mainstream issue that the XM commercial brings up. There is a film - a typical independent-style film (I say independent-style because I could probably go to my local multiplex and see the film; there's no need to travel to the Avon or the Cable Car or some other art-house cinema) - with the title "Little Miss Sunshine". The film itself looks like nothing spectacular. A typical psychological road comedy in the style of Sideways or Transamerica. But the music that was chosen for use in the trailer is what sets it apart.

Two songs, in particular. The Flaming Lips' "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" and Sufjan Stevens' "Chicago".

I'll stick to commenting on the Sufjan Stevens song, only because the Lips had some previous success in those glory days of Alternative Rock.

Actually, scratch that out. I won't. It's the same questions no matter who gets promoted in mainstream advertising, and I don't want to repeat what I said about Spoon.

It is interesting to note, though, after I wrote the words "Alternative Rock" that my Ipod, which I had set on shuffle mode, played the exact song I was planning on writing about. Interesting that Sufjan's singing about traveling in a van... and this film is, as aforementioned, a psychological road comedy.

Summer Listening...

2006-06-22T21:28:00.000-04:00

When I originally created this blog I made a promise that my personal life would not ever get tangled with my musical musings, but I must break it. I just got out of school Tuesday - thus, no more having to put up with the snobby attitudes of others (can you see the glaring irony? can you? can you?). Also, it means the start of the summer listening season. Over the past two years I have been trying to figure out whether my music listening habits are different in the summer than during the school year. So far, I know there is a severe difference, but I couldn't explain it. So that's out.

First of all, a list of the stuff I have already acquired that I have not yet listened to:

1. Wire - 154 (still, not yet! One would think I would be excited to hear this the day I bought it!)
2. Sonna - We Sing Loud Sing Soft Tonight
3. Silver Jews - Tanglewood Numbers
4. Brian Eno - Before and After Science

Add to that what I went out and bought on Monday:

5. Deerhoof - Milk Man
6. Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped

Add to that some new releases (or rereleases) I am awaiting the purchase of:

7. Built to Spill - You in Reverse
8. Loose Fur - Born Again in the USA
9. Sufjan Stevens - [whatever he decided to call his second disc about Illinois...]
10. Spoon - Telephono/Soft Effects
11. Thom Yorke - The Eraser

And, to save myself from an overload from listing too many records in too little time, I will stop there.

Britt Daniel Wants to sell you a car...

2006-06-10T18:45:00.000-04:00

... or XM radio...
... or AMC's series Hustle...

Before I continue on this path, let it be known that I really like Spoon and that they are worth all the preise they get. They seem to be a favorite of the folks at Time and Newsweek, as well as a typical indie standard. They may even be one of the few bands that can handle the stardom that is probably slowly approaching them as they sell themselves out to more and more people.

Last night I was watching TV - the channel and the program exactly I forget, but I believe it was a documentary on strange physiological mysteries or the like on the Travel Channel - and I saw a commercial for XM radio that started out with a scene of a laundromat with the subtitle "Bob Dylan was discovered here." By commercial's end, the song "Sister Jack" by Spoon was playing at full blast while the camera showed a little cafe of the Starbucks variety, in some hip and trendy urban center. The subtitle was "Spoon was Discovered Here".

I am only reminded of the first time that I saw an "indie" band sell out their song to an advertisement while they were not in the media's eye. In 2003 (I forget the date) - a few months before before megastardom and a platinum record from that catchy single "Float On" - Modest Mouse sold out their song "Gravity Rides Everything" to Nissan; it was then placed in one of their ads. From then on, I have seen quite a few "indie" bands in advertisements - most strange of all, the use of Sufjan Stevens in a commercial for the music channel Fuse.

I have no idea whether such things are the best for the artists. In the case of Spoon, the stuff they're doing is so mainstream that a bit of success might make them better. In the case of Modest Mouse, though, their early releases up to The Moon and Antarctica were jammy, psychadelic, and experimental - three no-nos in the world onf mainstream music. When Modest Mouse made the switch to mainstream pop - and therefore cut off all the psychadelic jams (think Night on the Sun and The Stars are Projectors), it was a loss. The White Stripes, however, were able to expand their sound after being discovered by a mainstream hungry for what's "hot" - so in no way can the effects on success be predicted.

A Musing

2006-05-26T22:19:00.000-04:00

I just had a thought yesterday (or could it be the day before?) that America's obsession with emo music could be related to the rise of the Thief-in-Chief we know and love, Mr. President George Bush. A radical idea, but certainly if you begin to watch MTV and the dark imagery of videos by such bands as Hawthorne Heights and Panic! at the Disco (seeing that exclamation point, I wonder of they listened to Godspeed you! black emperor), you see the logic.

Although we try to cover it up, we are in economic and political hard times compared to the end of Clinton's era. I'll be honest and say that I can't remember Clinton as a president because I was only 10 years old when Bush stepped in office after the Supreme Court ruled such, but certainly, the rock music coming out of that time had a care-free, nothing-is-sacred, let's-be-immature-teenagers-and-strip-naked-for-laughs feel to it. Quite a foil to the serious nature of modern rock (i.e. this "emo" thing)

I'm certain some other person has came up with the same idea but can argue it more eloquently. Currently I'm running some google searches and am coming up with nothing.

Recent Musical Purchases

2006-05-09T15:08:00.000-04:00

Spending 35 bucks on CDs and still getting nowhere...

I've been reading a book on "civilized conversation" and if I am reading the Words of this Fine and Noble book correctly, there should be no such thing as blogs. Conversation, according to the author, is designed for me to learn about the other person. A good conversationalist is one who listens more than he talks. This is probably the first update where I feel awkward about standing up to the harsh winds of the Great Online Desert and (even though there is nobody around) talking about myself.

Anyway, a well-deserved run to the record store produced these finds:

The Fiery Furnaces - Bitter Tea
Wire - 154 (remastered)
Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary

The thing about these new Wire rereleases is that there are no bonus tracks. According to the band, they wish to preserve the sanctity of the original record - this I can see as logical, because hearing the single version of "Outdoor Miner" only 5 tracks after the album version is disjointed. And honestly, none of the bonus tracks on Pink Flag and Chairs Missing are worth it. "A Question of Degree" (off of Chairs Missing) is in fact laughable; unlike the minimal and simple drum sound that makes Wire who they are, this song has a big, booming, arena-like 80's gated snare sound that overdominates the track. For Christ's Sake, is this the best you can do? Fortunately, it's not on the main record.

However, I've always liked bonus tracks, however good or bad, just for the curiosity. You never know what the band has done besides the main record - sometimes, it can be out in left field, and sometimes it can be album worthy. One of the things that makes the Pavement rereleases exceptional is how the B-sides can be better than the record itself.

Robert Pollard

2006-04-28T21:24:00.000-04:00

Has became a cliche of himself. Upon finally listening to From a Compound Eye, I find that his songs - although great songs that are very satisfying - all have the same exact elements. If anyone actually reads this and wishes to pound me on the head for taking as long as I did to get this, go ahead. It's just that I was expecting a change from the ordinary with this new post-GBV solo work, but it's more Universal Truths and Cycles style music.

We could analyze all of the cliches (the overall sound of the Acoustic songs; the snare on 1, the upbeat of 2, and 4; the chord progression train to nowhere...) but I am not interested in that.

What's interesting is that in the liner notes, Pollard is credited with "Guitars, vocals, Dobro, steel whistle". Strange, I thought Pollard did not play an instrument? Or could this be a sort of conspiracy?

War on "At War with the Mystics"

2006-04-21T13:59:00.000-04:00

I just got the new lips record for my birthday, and it's probably one of the more interesting things the Lips have done in their Radiohead-like career (we'll get to that later). Whereas the previous records - Clouds Taste Metallic, The Soft Bulletin - have gone more towards quirky, childlike indie pop, this new record is a throwback to 70's psychadelic prog-rockers such as Gong and Pink Floyd with a pit stop at the Fiery Furnaces. The Gong and the Pink Floyd come in because the record plays like an old concept record - complete with instrumentals, a coherent (is that the word) sound, etc...

But let's go back for a moment to my reference to the Furnaces. It suprises even me that I am comparing these two bands, but they both have a flair for the theatrical and the overdramatic. The Furnaces make records of high concept ("Rehearsing My Choir" is about the life of the brother-and-sister's grandmother, also a musician. I have not heard the record but fans appear to be divided on whether they like it or not) and songs of high concept (see the opener in "Blueberry Boat", Quay Cur, which has movement after movement - and part of it in an unrecognisable foriegn tongue - after movement of nautical goodness), and now so do the Lips.

I mentioned my Radiohead theory earlier. I theorize that the Flaming Lips and Radiohead - although on different planes (or even different dimensions) musically - have similar career paths. Clouds Taste Metallic is sort of like The Bends - the last proper guitar record. OK Computer is sort of like The Soft Bulletin - the first separture from the sound that made them famous. Kid A is like Yoshimi - I've never been able to get into either. Honestly, I've never even listened to Yoshimi in it's entirety, and it took me a couple years before I could listen to the whole of Kid A.

As a side note, the same person who inspired me to start this blog is the same person who exposed me to the Non-OK Computer part of the Radiohead catalog. I vaguely remember being 10 years old, in East West records in Orlando, where she at the time worked, and her suggesting to me that I listen to Kid A.

I'm stil not done with the Mix CD. I've just entered a mix trade on a message board I used to frequent many years back; maybe that will serve as the inspiration to finish it.

Mix CD

2006-03-29T18:01:00.000-05:00

For no apparent reason I can think of, I've been working on a set of random mix CDs. It's not like I gove these out to people regularly, but it's more of I'd like to put a new perspective on my music. But before we get into the mix and the first disc's playlist, let's take a digression for a while.

One of my favorite records from the 1970's is Brian Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. The thing I have always liked about this is its sameness - strange, because wouldn't you think if I said all songs sounded the same, it would be a negative comment? Well in this place it's not - it's instead an honor. Pretty much, the first five songs are in the same tempo, contain similar instrumantation, and have that same beat from the drum machine. As well, the chord changes sound the same (whether they are or not, I don't know. My ear can recognize only the most simple of chord progressions). As I progressed through the rest of Tiger Mountain for the first time, I could swear that I heard the same song twice.

With this double-disc mix CD set, I want to create the same feeling as was created in Tiger Mountain (and three other records I can think of off the top of my head: Wire's Chairs Missing, Sigur Ros's Takk, and Pavement's Crooked Rain Crooked Rain). So I've decided to pair up a bunch of similar-sounding songs and intersperse them throughout the double discs. To add to this, the beginning of the first disc is Winter 1 by The Fall and the end of the second disc is Winter 2 by The Fall.

I'll continue this tomorrow...

Recent Musical Purchases

2006-03-25T16:36:00.000-05:00

Thank the Good Lord for used CDs. It still costs $22 to buy 2 CDs, but that's 6 bucks cheaper than their new and unopened counterparts.

The only Wire records they had were either used or imported from England (for $15.99). So I guess my out-of-print theory had some truth to it, although I have no idea why such an important and influential band would only be availible as an import. While I was browsing they - what a strange coincidence - played a Wire song on the speakers - Lowdown, if I remember correctly - not my favorite song off the record, but it's nice someone's playing their music.

For the record, I just got:

Chairs Missing by Wire
Starlite Walker by the Silver Jews

Ending your Arctic monkeys Obsession, Part 2

2006-03-25T10:51:00.000-05:00

I don't plan at all for this to be an MP3 blog - there's far too many of those already in existence - but - with my discussion about how this record appears to be out of print - I had to indulge in uploading a song from Wire's Pink Flag. This song is probably one of my favorites; it has the wild energy found throughout the record, but it's not 200 beats per minute like the first 2 segments of the record.

Wire - Fragile (1.8 MB)

Also, sort of off-topic, but I am looking forward to the new Loose Fur and the new Built to Spill Records. According to the Drag City site, the new Loose Fur was released on the 21st of March, but I've heard nothing of it yet. So far 2006 has been rather an uneventful year in music, excepting the fact that Robert Pollard has released a post-GBV solo record, which is sitting on my shelf unlistened as of yet. These two records are the first two I am really waiting for; especially considering how Built to Spill have not released anything since 2001's Ancient Melodies of the Future.

Ending your Arctic Monkeys Obsession, part 1

2006-03-22T14:30:00.000-05:00

I had a clever alliterative title for this post last night but I forgot it, so I have a more straightforward version. Because - simply put - the Arctic Monkeys are overrated and overhyped, I thought I'd share my thoughts on British music from the Beatles to Bloc Party. And hopefully, give you - whoever you are, and whyever you have ventured to this virgin-soil filled corner of the internet - some ideas to extinguish the Arctic Monkeys mania.

Actually, I have something to confess to you. I have not heard even one note of the Arctic Monkeys' music. For all I know, it could be a respectable pop record. It's probably far better than Kelly Clarkson or Gwen Stefani or Ciara or anything in the top 40. It's just that I am skeptical that a band that just put out a record in JANUARY, for Christ's sake, has already gained this much hype. One of the things I respect about Modest Mouse - although, if you were to ask me, I would say their music has gone downhill with Good News - is that their success is fairly-earned. Simply put, they WORKED for their success.

And now... [drum roll] a short history of good British bands that respect is due to:

Wire. I've overlooked Pink Flag, which has been sitting on my CD rack for a year unlistened. I have no idea why. Wire is considered late punk/early new wave - they had a synth player, if I recall. Pink Flag is fast-paced, uptempo, hook-a-minute stuff. I have NO IDEA why the early Wire records appear to be out of print - I was looking for Chairs Missing on Amazon and it only comes up with the used records section.
The Fall. There's nothing I can say here. Simply listen to this band. Take this advice: wouldn't you rather want to hear the music yourself than hear some semi-educated lunatic rant mindlessly about it?

I'm trying not to include overtly mainstream stuff like Radiohead and Bloc Party and The Clash, so it looks like we end here.

Part 2 will be the obligatory, "You've discussed the music, now where IS the music?" part. Maybe. Maybe not. We will see.

testing, 1, 2, 3, can thou this see?

2006-03-21T15:30:00.000-05:00

This blog rose out of a conversation about whether Jenny Lewis (of Rilo Kiley) deserves the label mainstream or not. For the record, I said yes, they are mainstream and my friend said she’s no more mainstream than BlocParty.

Now, we're on a debate about whether the Arctic Monkeys (in keeping with the Holier than Thou attitude of true music snobs, I am boldfacing the artists which I namedrop) are manufactured or not. Honestly, they can only be manufactured or in some other way designed to be commercially viable. Look, their record was considered The 5th best British record of all time by NME, even though it was only released a month or so ago. Doesn't that sound even just a bit fishy?

As for the name respect is due, it's simply put that respect is due to the good music of the world, whether those bands have it or not. It's also a great song by the Dismemberment Plan from their second record.

Pretty much expect a typical music blog. A bit of music, a bit of ranting on whatever I am feeling like ranting about.