notes - archives - april 2004

4.1.04
My coworker Mark brought me another winning iTunes Pepsi cap this week, and I finally redeemed it last night. I seriously thought about getting Prince's single from his upcoming Musicology album, but I listened to the clip a couple of times and it didn't really grab me, so I settled for an iTunes exclusive track from the White Stripes, "Black Jack Davey", which is apparently their take on a traditional english ballad. Whatever it is, it fucking rocks——very Zeppelin-esque. I would have paid for this one eventually if I hadn't gotten another free song.

4.2.04
Sometimes I think the iPod has its own ideas about what it wants to listen to. Usually, I make a general playlist at the beginning of each week with 300 or so songs by selecting 15 to 20 albums that I want to listen to, most of them recent purchases, and then randomly shuffle the list each day. And without fail, the iPod seems to latch onto one or two albums whose songs seem like they're constantly coming up, as if it wants to make sure those records specifically get heard.

This week's iPod album of the week was Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism, which is interesting because it hasn't been in the mix in a while, but I added it this week because there's a possibility that I'm going to see them tonight in Charlottesville. I didn't really care for this record when it came out, and I still don't think it's anywhere near as good as their last one, The Photo Album, but I definitely have a greater appreciation for several of the songs on the record thanks to iPod's constant selection of them from this week's playlist, which has close to 600 songs in it. Random my ass; Apple put a brain in these things and didn't tell anyone.

4.5.04
God is smiling on me: the Modest Mouse CDs I ordered last week, Good News for People Who Love Bad News (new material) and Baron von Bullshit Rides Again (live album) both arrived on Saturday, three days ahead of the official release date. Suffice it to say that, although I may have other records listed in the rotation, these are all I'm really going to be listening to for the next couple of weeks.

4.6.04
The best moment so far on Baron von Bullshit Rides Again, Modest Mouse's first official live album: frontman Isaac Brock's minute and a half diatribe about playing Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird" after an audience request, in which he lists off all the reasons why the band will never play the song, culminating with the following:

Life is too fucking short to play or hear "Freebird".

Hear, hear.

4.7.04
Cool! My friend Doug sent me a $20 gift certificate to the iTunes music store for my birthday, and although it was tempting to splurge and spend the whole thing at once, I was able to restrain myself and only buy three non-album/exclusive tracks that I've had my eye on for a while. The first two were from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs: the brilliant "Yeah! New York" (appropriate, because that's where Doug is from) and "Countdown", a relatively mellow, bluesy romp. The final track was "University Microfilms International", a bouncy jungle outtake from Stereolab's Margarine Eclipse sessions (coincidentally, one of the best music reviews I've ever read was Doug's take on Stereolab's Dots and Loops).

So thanks, Doug. I'll keep you updated here on what I do with your gift in the coming weeks.

4.8.04
Yesterday at the Orioles game they let a group from the Boys and Girls Clubs sing the national anthem, and I'm not trying to be mean, but it was the worst thing I've ever heard. We have the kids choir sing at our church service every now and then, and they're not great, but they're reasonably tolerable. These kids were the same ages as the kids in church (anywhere from 6 to 12, it looked like), and they just sounded terrrible. They made the church kids sound like the freaking Vienna Boys Choir. I wonder if they even rehearsed, or if the adult in charge just said, "You guys all know the national anthem, right? Good. Let's go get some ice cream." It was truly, truly awful, and I just hope the kids were so unaware of how bad they sounded that they had a good time anyway, so that at least there was someone who got some pleasure from it.

4.9.04

Mixtape: 1987
The 1987 mixtape was a hard one to put together. There were plenty of great albums to choose from, but once I had the general list of artists I wanted to include, figuring out which tracks would work well with the others and setting the order was quite a bit more difficult than it was for the 1986 mixtape, which seemed to have a few more natural groupings in terms of links between the styles of the different bands. 1987 is really a mishmash, including tracks from bands that had undeniably gone mainstream like R.E.M. and U2, both of whom released their first true blockbuster commerical albums in 1987; songs from some of my favorite bands of all time including the Smiths, Julian Cope, and Game Theory; and a ton of tracks from artists who released their career-making discs in 1987 but never acheived widespread success (in America, anyway).

About ten of these tracks have remained constant throughout the process of making this mixtape, and the other ten have been swapped in and out, moved around in the track order, and generally remained in flux. I got tired of tweaking after a couple of weeks, though, so this is my lineup and I'm sticking to it:

"Tennessee Fire"
Cuba
The Silos
"Mandinka"
The Lion and the Cobra
Sinead O'Connor
"Trampoline"
Saint Julian
Julian Cope
"We Love You Carol and Alison"
Lolita Nation
Game Theory
"Girlfriend in a Coma"
Strangeways, Here We Come
The Smiths
"Whiskered Wife"
Three Squares and a Roof
The Balancing Act
"The Saturday Boy"
Back to Basics
Billy Bragg
"Scotty's Lament"
Boylan Heights
The Connells
"King of Birds"
Document
R.E.M.
"The Lazarus Heart"
...Nothing Like the Sun
Sting
"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"
The Joshua Tree
U2
"Hymn to Saint Jude"
All Fools Day
The Saints
"Thomas Doubter"
Tiny Days
Scruffy the Cat
"No New Tale to Tell"
Earth, Sun, Moon
Love & Rockets
"Big Decision"
Babble
That Petrol Emotion
"Ahead"
The Ideal Copy
Wire
"Could You Be the One?"
Warehouse: Songs and Stories
Hüsker Dü
"Happy When It Rains"
Darklands
Jesus and Mary Chain
"Just Like Heaven"
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
The Cure
"Can't Hardly Wait"
Pleased to Meet Me
The Replacements
"Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want"
Louder Than Bombs
The Smiths

4.12.04
I picked up two more used CDs on Friday while waiting for Julie to meet me for lunch, Fugazi's Steady Diet of Nothing and U2's Boy. Fugazi is one of those bands that I have always meant to buy because I know enough about them to know that I would probably like them a lot, but I've never been motivated enought to purchase one of their discs (although I love "Waiting Room", which Regan put on a mixtape for me), so I couldn't pass up a used copy of this disc for only $7. It's well worth the investment; the tone reminds me a lot of Trail of Dead, and the music has links to Helmet, Rage Against the Machine, Pixies, and My Bloody Valentine, to name just a few.

Like War, which I found used a few months ago, I used to own Boy on cassette, but I never bothered to replace it on CD because I was waiting to find a cheap used copy, and on Friday I finally did. It's incredible how mature and confident U2 sounded, even way back in 1980 when most of them were just kids, and their energy still shines through almost 25 years later. They kind of fell out of favor with me after the overly ambitious Rattle and Hum and the confused experimentation of their 90s work, but I probably should have tried a little harder to get this record back in my collection sooner.

4.13.04
Cool. Modest Mouse's new record, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, is number 1 on the iTunes sales chart. Of course, William Hung's record is at number 11, but still...

4.14.04
I bought Guadalcanal Diary's Jamboree the same day I bought my first R.E.M. record, Lifes Rich Pageant. The Athens, GA scene was pretty hot at the time, and these were two of the biggest bands to come out of it. Guadalcanal Diary were often criticized as an R.E.M. ripoff, but that was just an easy way for lazy critics to dismiss them. Although Don Dixon produced their first record and they were part of a wave of southern bands that relied on a traditional rock guitar-bass-drums setup at a time when synths and electronic beats were all the rage on the radio, their style was so different from R.E.M. that if they hadn't been from Athens, the critics would have never been allowed to get away with the R.E.M. comparisons. Frontman Murray Attaway was a storyteller, with a clean voice and narrative lyrics that are almost the complete opposite of Michael Stipe's mumbled stream of consciousness poetics, and the production on Guadalcanal's records was always much crisper than R.E.M.'s work of the same period, even when they shared producers.

I bring this up because Jamboree has been one of those records that I've been searching for on CD for well over a decade, and I finally found it, on Amazon of all places, as part of a special two albums on one CD compilation that includes their first record, Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man (which I already had on CD) along with Jamboree. The only place I had seen it prior to this was on eBay, and it ended up selling for well over $60 (and I'm not entirely convinced that it was a non-CD-R as the auction claimed).

I'd forgotten half the songs on Jamboree, it had been so long since I'd heard the record, but hearing it now reminds me just how good Guadalcanal Diary was in their prime. They were always much more pop-oriented than R.E.M., and it's always been a mystery to me why they didn't acheive a higher level of success given the success at the same time of bands like R.E.M. and the Connells. I guess, like Love Tractor, they were doomed always to be in the shadow of Stipe and company, no matter how different their sound was. It seems like the critics decided that there could be only one original band from Athens, and they annointed R.E.M.; everyone else was viewed as a knockoff (contrast this to the same situation a few years later in Seattle, when it would have been easy to classify Pearl Jam and Soundgarden as imitators of Nirvana's sound, but instead the critics gave each band their due for their unique style). Oh well. What's done is done. But if you like the southern-style pop of R.E.M., Let's Active, the Connells, Love Tractor, or the Reivers, you should definitely pick this up; it's only a couple more dollars than a normal CD, and it has two of the best records from that period on one disc.

4.15.04
I didn't think I'd be able to talk myself into buying Outkast's Speakeboxx/The Love Below on just the strength of "Hey Ya!" (which is why I eventually ended up buying that song off of iTunes), but after seeing Big Boi perform "Rooster" on Chapelle's Show, I might have to reconsider. It still seems like there's a lot of filler on the record, but if I see a used copy somewhere, it will be harder to resist the urge to pick it up.

4.16.04
Wilco, Wilco, Wilco. To the RIAA and the coporate record labels, it must seem like the main reason you exist is to be a thorn in the side of their overly agressive legal teams who are intent on blaming industry woes solely on internet file sharing even though we are still suffering through a post-dotcom bubble recession and the labels themselves seem intent on dumbing down music to the point where our big choices will be between Britney or Christina. First your label tells you that your record, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, isn't fit for commercial release, and believe it so strongly that they release you from your contract, basically giving you the record for free to shop to another label. After touring and streaming the record from your web site, this is exactly what you do, selling it back to a subsidiary of the exact same label that refused to release it in the first place. Despite a year-long delay, and the music from the record being freely available from both your web site as a stream and from the various file trading services as MP3s, the record goes on to be your most critically lauded and commercially viable release, receiving near-unanimous praise and cracking the Billboard top 20.

And now, as you prepare for the release of the follow-up to Yankee, A Ghost is Born, you are once again streaming the entire record from your web site for free months before the official release. And after learning that the tracks had been leaked to the file sharing networks, instead of panicking and moving up your release date (as most record companies do when a big act's new disc gets uploaded by the file traders well before the official release of the album), you actually pushed it back to June 22. By the logic of the RIAA, which fervently believes that any record that is shared by file traders is doomed to sell zero copies (despite bountiful evidence to the contrary), you should be bankrupt; Yankee shouldn't have sold any copies, and neither should Ghost. When are the labels going to wake up and look at success stories like yours and realize that it's the quality of the music that counts, and that real fans want to support the artists they love? In fact, Wilco fans believe in this so firmly that they set up a web site called justafan.org where fans who have downloaded the new record can atone for their file sharing trangressions by sending money via PayPal, all of which will be donated to the band's favorite charity, Doctors Without Borders. As of today, the site has collected nearly $8,000.

I've been listening to the new record almost non-stop since the stream was released (which you should be doing, too, if you're anywhere near a computer with a broadband connection), and so far, I have to say it's not as good as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But that doesn't mean it's bad——Yankee is the only record released in the last five years that I didn't hesitate to rate a 10 out of 10 after only one listen, and that appraisal is reaffirmed every time I hear it. Ghost starts out slower, and has a couple of more extended songs that remind me of the experimental stuff that frontman Jeff Tweedy did under the name Loose Fur (recorded in parallel with Yankee and featuring the producer of that record and Wilco's drummer), while other tracks are more straighforward, like the stuff on Wilco's first brilliant record, Being There (I know there's another record before that one, but Being There is the first one that showed hints of the innovation to come on Summer Teeth an Yankee).

Some of my favorite tracks are "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" (which moves along pretty quickly despite its nearly 11 minute length), "Handshake Drugs" (an earlier version of which was included on the free internet-only EP More Like the Moon), "Company in My Back", and the closer, "The Late Greats". The only real weak spot is the penultimate track, "Less Than You Think", which is nothing more than 15 minutes of annoying drone that threatens to sabotage what is an otherwise stellar effort from Wilco (the same way that "Treefingers" is the only blemish on Radiohead's otherwise perfect two-album combo of Kid A and Amnesiac). Hopefully Jeff Tweedy will have the good sense to remove it before the record is officially released.

At any rate, I fully expect Ghost to make my top 10 this year, and it wouldn't surprise me if it made it to the number 1 slot like its predecessor. I just wish I didn't have to wait another two months to buy it and load it onto my iPod.

4.19.04
After writing the previous entry on Wilco, I spent a lot of time re-listening to Summer Teeth, which I hadn't listened to in earnest in a couple of years, and man, it's really, really good. Better than I remember it being when it first came out, and I thought it was brilliant then. It still doesn't top Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, I don't think, but I think the graph of the band's development between Being There and Yankee is more of a curve now than an abrupt upward spike.

4.20.04
The iPod has been playing a lot of Björk's solo debut (cleverly titled Debut) this week, which is fine by me. I'm especially fond of "Anchor Song", which sounds to me like it was at least seven or eight years ahead of its time.

4.21.04
I spent a little more of Doug's iTunes gift certificate yesterday, snagging a new EP from Modest Mouse that contains an alternate mix of "The Good Times Are Killing Me", the closing track from their new record (this is apparently the original version, before producer David Fridmann added his special touches to it), and "I've Got It All(most)", the b-side from the vinyl version of the "Float On" single. I had long resisted getting two other Modest Mouse tracks on iTunes, an alternate version of "Dark Center of the Universe" and "Your Life" (which is really an alternate version of "Lives" from The Moon and Antarctica), because I was having a hard time plunking down $2 for alternate versions. But after buying the alternate version of "The Good Times Are Killing Me", there was nothing holding me back anymore, so I bought those two tracks as well. The last thing I bought was a remix of the Rapture's "I Need Your Love", one of the best songs off of last year's Echoes.

So that's 8 songs total, with 12 more to go. I think you've found my weakness, iTunes: just keep on posting unreleased material from Modest Mouse, and you'll soon have the rest of Doug's gift certificate.

4.22.04
Those new Modest Mouse songs I got off iTunes earlier this week pushed me over the edge, and I have now officially returned to an all-Modest-Mouse, all-the-time playlist on my iPod. The last time this happened, it lasted for six months, but that's when I was first discovering the band and there was so much new material to listen to. I'm guessing this won't last through the weekend, and I'll certainly break out of it by the time the Good Life and the Beta Band come out with their new releases in early May. But if I were forced to pick only one band's music to take with me to a deserted island, there's no longer any doubt in my mind which band it would be. The Smiths haven't exactly been ousted as my favorite band ever, but the sheer volume and variety of Modest Mouse's catalog gives them the edge in this particular hypothetical question.

4.23.04
If the Pixies, who split very acrimoniously when frontman Black Francis sent the other band members a fax telling them they were out of the group, can get back together, anyone can. So Johnny Marr and Morrissey, quit screwing around: make up and get back in the damn studio. The only halfway decent things either of you have done since the Smiths broke up has been stuff that sounded a lot like the Smiths. Just bury the hatchet already, for the good of humanity. Or at least follow the Pixies' lead and do it for the money.

4.26.04
More new purchases, this time just picking up odds and ends while waiting for the summer release season to get underway (which will include new discs from the Beta Band, Wilco, the Cure, the Good Life, the Magnetic Fields, and the Unicorns, among others). First up was the Decemberists' 5 Songs EP (a bit of a misnomer because it actually contains six songs), which was released in between their first two full lengths and is just as good as either. I was actually looking for their most recent release, another EP called the Tain, but I'm guessing I'll just have to order that online since the record store doesn't seem inclined to stock it. The Decemberists, along with the Walkmen, are quickly becoming one of my favorite new bands; I love everything they've done so far, and I can't wait for more. Hopefully I won't have to wait too long for another album; they're supposedly entering the studio in the next few weeks to begin work on their third record.

Since I was picking up EPs, I decided to bite the bullet and buy Iron and Wine's The Sea and the Rhythm, since I like the other two releases so much (especially the new one, Our Endless Numbered Days) and Tom highly recommended it. I wanted a full length CD to round things out, and after poking around for a little while, I settled on Hot Hot Heat's Makeup the Breakdown, for no other reason than I've had the song "Bandages" stuck in my head for a while now and I was in the mood to try something new. I like it pretty well; I listened to it on the iPod while mowing the lawn this weekend (I have also finally figured out how to stick the earbuds in my ears correctly, so in addition to providing me with the diversion of music, the iPod also blocked out a lot of the lawnmower noise).

I'm happy with all three purchases, but I have to say that of all my recent purchases, the Liars' They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top is still my favorite. I like it so much that I'm sorely tempted to purchase their new one, They Were Wrong So We Drowned, despite the uniformly negative reviews and despite the fact that I haven't liked a second of the song samples I've heard from that record. Monument is just an astounding CD; if you're not sure how much life rock has left in it, you only have to listen to this disc once to see that there are still undiscovered worlds of possibilities left within the genre.

4.27.04
As much as I like Iron and Wine's Our Endless Numbered Days, I just might like The Sea and the Rhythm better. Especially "Jesus the Mexican". That's right up there with "Naked As We Came".

4.28.04
No good new exclusives on iTunes yesterday. Come on, Apple, Doug's money is burning a hole in my pocket!

4.29.04
So Apple unveiled a new version of iTunes and the iTunes music store yesterday, on the first anniversary of the music store. They fell short of the 100 millions songs they had hoped to sell in the first year by about 30 million, but sales per week should mean that the second year of the store's operation will generate twice as many sales as the first year.

A couple of the cool new features they introduced were the ability to publish your personal playlists to the music store where every iTunes user can see and purchase them, and a promise of one free song download a week (and for this first week, they're offering a free song each day). The playlist functionality is cool, but unfortunately it won't include any songs not in the iTunes music store, which for serious playlist makers like me means that our playlists will likely be incomplete. It seems stupid to me not to list the songs that aren't in their catalog——it could even be a data-gathering tool to let them know which records aren't yet available on iTunes that should be. The free download is cool, but I'll be interested to see if they offer rare/unreleased tracks or if they just offer up old songs that fans are already likely to have. The first free download, for instance, is the Foo Fighters "My Hero" from The Colour and the Shape, which was probably their most successful record. I still hold out hope that they could post some really cool stuff, but the songs they choose to release over the next week will be telling.

There's a bunch of other stuff——a new lossless encoder for CD quality tracks that takes up half the space of traditional AIFF files, the ability to print out jewel case inserts for albums that you've downloaded, and the playlists of over 1200 radio stations so it's easy to find a song you might have heard (if you're still dumb enough to listen to the radio, I guess)——but the playlist publishing and free downloads were the two features that seemed most interesting to me. Hopefully Apple will continue to enhance this product and stay well ahead of the rapidly growing pack of powerful competitors.

4.30.04
Ugh. Yesterday's free track on iTunes was Avril Lavigne's "Under My Skin", a single from her upcoming sophomore disc. I could spend several paragraphs telling you all the things I hate about Avril Lavigne and all the reasons why she's the epitome of everything that's wrong with the major labels and mainstream commercial radio, but I'm betting that if you read this site on a regular basis, you know already know all this. So I'll spare you. But please, Apple, spare us: give us a decent track before your week of free giveaways is over.