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august 2004
8.2.04
I think we have finally come up with a solution for the inability to play the iPod in the new car: following up on an idea from a friend of mine in Alabama, I have located a fairly cheap replacement CD deck that has a headphone-jack sized auxilary input on the front. We should be able to use a male-to-male cable to connect the headphone output on the iPod to the aux input on the new CD deck (she has a similar deck, and she reports success with this approach).
Given the proliferation of iPods and other digital portable music players, you'd think these kinds of inputs would be more or less standard on car stereos, but surprisingly, we found only one manufacturer (Aiwa) who had this feature available, and it only seemed to be found on their older models. Whatever. I could care less about all the crap on the newer, more expensive players, like the ability to play crappy monochrome videos or change the color of the display; I just want something that will let me play CDs and hook up my iPod. I know that Alpine is coming out with a system this fall that will let you hook up your iPod to one of their stereos and control it from the in-dash display, but again, that's useless to me——I usually just put a playlist on random shuffle and let it go when I'm driving. Plus, the total cost for purchasing and installing the Alpine deck and the addtional iPod adapter would be at least $500, whereas we got this new rig for less than $200.
When we found the deck we wanted, we went ahead and purchased it because the store was running a free installation special that only lasted through the end of that day, but they won't actually be able to install it until next Saturday. So we have one more week of being limited to CDs only in the new car, but after that the iPod should once again return to its place of honor during the morning and afternoon commutes. |
8.3.04
Let's see: new purchases. There isn't really a whole lot I've been jonesing for, but I was curious to see how the new Badly Drawn Boy (One Plus One Is One) and Rilo Kiley (More Adventurous) turned out. Both have recently jumped ship to new labels, Rilo Kiley from from indie Saddle Creek to the big boys at Warner, and Badly Drawn Boy from megacorp BMG to indie Astral Works.
They were both supposed to have been released last week, but Rilo Kiley has apparently been pushed back to mid-August (although you can purchase the whole album on iTunes now, and it still lists the original release date). So when I went in to pick these up and couldn't find the Rilo, I added the Streets' Original Pirate Material to my shopping cart (I'm increasingly impressed with the recently released follow-up, A Grand Don't Come for Free), and also picked up the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat, because the kinds of people that get sick in love with the same kind of weird stuff that I fall sick in love with seem to be sick in love with this record.
I went to another store in a futile attempt to locate the MIA Rilo Kiley, and left there with a $6 used copy of Broken Social Scene's Feel Good Lost, which was worth getting for $6 even though it's mostly instrumental and I tend not to be too fond of records that are mostly instrumental.
So far the Streets is the one I've listened to the most, but I can tell that Blueberry Boat is going to grow on me the more I hear it. I haven't listened to Feel Good Lost much at all, and I've been mostly unimpressed with the Badly Drawn Boy, even though I've been a pretty big fan of his up until now. I'm willing to give it some time, because it took me a while to see the genius of his About a Boy soundtrack, but One Plus One Is One seems lacking in humor and very maudlin. |
8.4.04
The Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat is a strange little record. Each song averages around five minutes, with a few of them clocking in close to ten, but they're not really songs in the strict pop sense since where they end up is light years from where they began, and there is very little repetition of a given musical theme within each composition. The Furnaces are kind of like the Unicorns, but even more far-ranging and even less likely to stick with any one song fragment for more than a minute. Blueberry Boat is not all good, but taken as a whole, it's certainly worth listening to; it's like watching an episode of the Simpsons made in the last couple of years: crammed full of non-sequitors and random jokes, and there's quite a bit that's forgettable, but you keep paying attention anyway because you know that in thirty seconds there's a good chance they will have moved on to something that you do like. It's an album full of bridges, without any cumbersome verse-chorus-verse structures to get in the way. I'm still not sure if this is one of the best records released this year, but it's certainly the most ambitious, and there's enough interesting ideas on it to make it worthwhile. |
8.5.04
I don't really have anything to post about today, so I'm once again going to point you to this William Shatner cover of Pulp's "Common People". I'm still hooked, and I'm even finding myself pondering whether his album might not turn out to be half-decent. But that's crazy talk. Isn't it? |
8.6.04
I am desperate to get my iPod back in my car. It's basically been six weeks, ever since that idiot hit my car while it was parked on the street and I've been driving either a rental car or our new car, which does not currently have the ability to interface with the iPod. Until Saturday at 5:00, that is. |
8.9.04
The iPod mess with the new car has been successfully resolved. Last week we bought a relatively cheap stereo ($120 from Best Buy, and installation was free) with a minijack auxilary input on the front of the unit to replace the Saturn factory stereo (conveniently, the color of the stereo happens to match the interior of the car perfectly, too). This lets me plug one end of a male-to-male minijack into the headphone jack on the iPod and the other end into the aux input on the stereo, thereby allowing the iPod to play through the car speakers.
Just for fun, I played a CD on the new stereo and had the same album going at the same time on the iPod and then switched back and forth between them to compare the sound quality. Since the iPod uses 128k compressed AAC files, I had expected there to be some difference, even on the car speakers, but surprisingly, I couldn't hear any and neither could Julie (which makes the writer of this recent diatribe about compressed music sound all the more like a luddite; just what kind of equipment is he listening to music on, anyway?).
So I'm finally happy with the new car: good speakers, a CD-capable stereo with a multi-band equalizer, and the abilty to play my iPod. And as an added bonus, since the new stereo is much smaller than the factory stereo, we now have a nice little cubby below the new head unit where we can keep CDs, maps, garage passes, etc. |
8.10.04
My friend Jean has been looking for new music, and despite the fact that her husband is a musician (he plays guitar for a Baltimore funk band called Mofofunka; they played a date on the Warped tour this past weekend) and a lot of her favorite bands (the Cure, Radiohead, P J Harvey, the Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc.) are heavily represented in my own collection, she doesn't really have a way to hear about new bands. So I decided to make her a mix CD, partly to introduce her to some bands I think she'd like and partly to play around with some song combinations for the CDs I'm going to try to make for my sister Tori before we start our week-long road trip together. Most of the stuff is from the past couple of years, and I'm hoping that Jean hasn't heard too much of it; I want her to tell me what she likes and doesn't like so I can get a better sense of her taste and make her another mix in the near future that might suit her better. Anyway, here it is:
- "Meet Me in the Dollar Bin"
Inches
Les Savy Fav
- "July, July!"
Castaways and Cutouts
The Decemberists
- "Flower"
Apple O'
Deerhoof
- "Mr. Your on Fire Mr."
They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top
The Liars
- "The Radiator Hums"
Domestica
Cursive
- "Niagara Falls"
Michigan Outtakes
Sufjan Stevens
- "New Year's Eve"
Bows and Arrows
The Walkmen
- "Dreams"
Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
TV on the Radio
- "Fake French"
Feminist Sweepstakes
Le Tigre
- "December 4th"
The Grey Album
Danger Mouse (w/ Jay-Z and the Beatles)
- "Jonathan Fisk"
Kill the Moonlight
Spoon
- "Love Is All"
Echoes
The Rapture
- "Take Time"
The Lemon of Pink
The Books
- "Center of the Universe"
Keep It Like a Secret
Built to Spill
- "Jason's Basement"
Movement
The Gossip
- "Here It Comes"
Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks
Modest Mouse
- "I Don't Believe You"
I
Magnetic Fields
- "Portland Oregon"
Van Lear Rose
Loretta Lynn (w/ Jack White)
- "Naked As We Came"
Our Endless Numbered Days
Iron and Wine
- "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl"
You Forgot It In People
Broken Social Scene
- "Maps"
Fever to Tell
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
- "The Late Greats"
A Ghost Is Born
Wilco
- "Whodunnit?"
Son of Evil Reindeer
The Reindeer Section
I don't think I'm going to do any commentary on this right now (especially since I haven't even come close to finishing the commentary for my 1987 mix yet), but I'm pretty happy with the overall mix. I don't know that I could just use another copy of this for Tori——I'm not sure how she would like some of the NYC postpunk punk of Les Savy Fav and the Liars, for example——but it will make a good starting point for one of her CDs.
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8.12.04
My email and web connection were down from when I got home last night to when I went to bed, so I didn't get a chance to see if anybody recommended anything to me. Today I'm going to go get the Good Life's Album of the Year and the Black Keys' latest (I can't remember the name, and I can't look it up because I have no internet connection, but I'll know it when——I guess I should say if——I see it in the store) to tide me over, and I'll try to check my bluecricket account over the web to see if any of you sent me any good ideas. Hopefully my connection will come back up by the time I get home today so I can post this entry. |
8.13.04
Got my internet back just in time. But I won't be back for a week, so no need to keep checking the site wondering what's happened to me. See you then. |
8.13.04
I didn't get those records I talked about yesterday yet, but I'm going to look for them today, along with discs from Menomena and Brian Eno that were recommended to me by Tom and another reader of the site. I like Eno anyway, and the one Tom recommended sounds like it will dovetail nicely into my love for the Velvet Underground, while Menomena sounds like one of those quirky little bands that will carve out a place forever in my heart. |
8.23.04
Back now. Here are the releases I bought just before I left for my trip: Here Come the Warm Jets by Brian Eno (highly recommended by Tom), Album of the Year by the Good Life, Blue Cathedral by Comets on Fire, and A Different Class by Pulp. I haven't really listened to any of them yet because I only took CDs on my trip that I thought my sister might like, and I didn't think she'd like any of these.
So. That's that. I just don't have the energy to write about anything else right now. Content should be back to normal soon. |
8.24.04
Since my sister has been out of the country for about a year, I wanted to use our drive out to Iowa as a way to get her caught up musically on some of the better stuff that has come out in her absence. In addition to three mix CDs that were slightly altered versions of CDs I've made for other people recently, here are the 24 CDs that I brought along for the drive out to Iowa, along with what Tori thought of them:
- Fever to Tell
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Tori liked this one pretty well, but I think some parts were too loud for her taste.
- Bows and Arrows
The Walkmen
I think she liked this okay, but she didn't really say much about it and she didn't request to listen to it again.
- The Electric Version
The New Pornographers
I brought this along because she had heard it and liked it before, and sure enough, she loved it.
- Echoes
The Rapture
Didn't listen to it.
- Think Tank
Blur
Liked it.
- Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
TV on the Radio
Didn't listen to it.
- Greetings from Michigan
Sufjan Stevens
Liked this one pretty well——we heard let it play through a couple of times.
- Album of the Year
The Good Life
Didn't hate it, but I don't think anything about it really appealed to her.
- Different Class
Pulp
Didn't listen to it.
- Castaways and Cutouts
The Decemberists
Liked it.
- Good News for People Who Love Bad News
Modest Mouse
Liked it pretty well.
- A Ghost Is Born
Wilco
Liked it, but not as much as the other Wilco discs she's heard.
- Here Come the Warm Jets
Brian Eno
Didn't object to it while it was playing, but she seemed pretty eager to get something else when the last track finished.
- Our Endless Numbered Days
Iron and Wine
Liked it a lot——we listened to it three times even though it made her sad.
- i
The Magnetic Fields
Seemed to like it when it was playing, but by the next day she had forgotten that we had already listened to it once.
- Uh Huh Her
P J Harvey
I think she liked this one, but I don't think she loved it.
- Fingers Crossed
Architecture in Helsinki
Loved this one——I had to practically pry it out of the CD player.
- A Grand Don't Come for Free
The Streets
No comment on this one. I think she liked the humor in his stories, but I'm not sure the music was really to her taste.
- Sonic Nurse
Sonic Youth
Didn't listen to it.
- Franz Ferdinand
Franz Ferdinand
Didn't listen to it.
- They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top
The Liars
Didn't like this very much.
- Hearts of Oak
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Loved this one.
- So Much for the City
The Thrills
Liked this one okay, I think.
- Ghetto Pop Life
Danger Mouse and Jemini
She's not a real big rap/hip hop fan, but I think she liked this okay. At any rate, she enjoyed the song where Jemini repeatedly asks the question "Who's the shit?" and then answers, of course, "I'm the shit."
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8.25.04
Several of you have sent in suggestions for new music, which I appreciate, and which I will listen to and hopefully briefly review here in the coming days. In the meantime, any of you who haven't spoken up, please feel free to send more suggestions my way. I've been obsessed with Pulp's Different Class over the last couple of days, and I'll likely spend some pretty serious time with Clinic's Winchester Cathedral before the week is over, but I'm going to listen to your submissions over the next few days when I need some variety. So even if I haven't responded to you personally yet, know that I appreciate you taking the time to write and I'm looking forward to hearing the songs/bands/albums you suggested. |
8.26.04
A bunch of new releases somehow snuck up on me, so I went to the store last night to track down a few of them. I had my top four in mind, but my list extended to ten or so possibilities because I was sure that they wouldn't have at least one and there was a good chance they wouldn't have two or more. But to my surprise, all four of my top choices were in stock, including Animal Collective's Sung Tongs (I've resisted these guys for a while because Pitchfork drools incessantly over them, but I finally listened to some samples the other day and loved what I heard), Clinic's Winchester Cathedral, Tilly and the Wall's Wild Like Children (like Rilo Kiley playing a drunk, after-hours acoustic set with tap shoes——yes, tap shoes——instead of drums), and Drive-By Truckers' The Dirty South (I didn't even know they had been in the studio since last year's Decoration Day, so I was completely floored to see this new release pop up out of nowhere). I still have plenty of choices now if I choose to go shopping again next week, since I didn't even pick up the new ones from Rilo Kiley, Steve Earle, and G. Love (another one that caught me unawares). |
8.27.04
Mixtape: 1987
Track 6
"Whiskered Wife"
Three Squares and a Roof
The Balancing Act
You've likely never heard of the Balancing Act, and you probably won't ever hear about them again after reading this entry since their time on the music industry stage was tragically brief. Their sound is pretty unique, combining acoustic-rock with frenetic drumming, multi-part vocal harmonies, intelligent, literate lyrics, and a pop sensibility that keeps you singing along to even their darkest tunes. I heard about them when a friend of mine read a review of their debut EP, New Campfire Songs, comparing the drumming to the Violent Femmes, with whom my friend was then obsessed. I heard and liked the EP, but I didn't buy anything from the band until they released their first full-length, Three Squares and a Roof, which remains one of my favorite records from the 80s.
For some reason, IRS (the burgeoning indie label that included once and future stars like R.E.M., the Go-Gos, Fine Young Cannibals, and the Bangles, among others) decided that the Balancing Act had Next Big Thing potential, and so for the follow up to Three Squares (the presciently titled Curtains), the label set them up with producer Andy Gill (who you might know better as a member of the seminal post-punk band Gang of Four) in the hopes that he could bring just the right amount of studio gloss to band's acoustic folkie tendencies. The colder, more mechanized production on that record was in direct contrast to the warm, natural tones that dominated Three Squares, and ultimately the confusing mix of wood and metal ended up alienating the group's core fan base without giving them the broader commercial appeal IRS had hoped for, and the group disbanded shortly after its release.
Three Squares remains their masterpiece, stronger, more confident, and better-produced than New Campfire Songs, but without crossing the line into the empty-studio production sound that took the soul out of the songs on Curtains. "Whiskered Wife" is a fairly representative track from Three Squares, with a layer of shimmering acoustic guitars and snare-heavy, high-speed drums shuffling under a Byrds-like electric guitar chime that anchors the music. The song tells the story of a man who has grown tired of the domestic web he has woven for himself, and so he leaves his family to start a new life somewhere else. No one knows what happens to him until years later, when his abandoned wife happens upon his picture in the paper. Here's the chorus:
This home is broken
No lights are on
There's someone hoping
Hope's not all gone
Pretty depressing stuff, right? But even though the lyrics have real emotional resonance (one of the best lines: "What's a family but a bill that's due?"), I guarantee that you'll be tapping your toes and humming along by the time the first chorus hits you. The Balancing Act were clever and quirky, the kind of band that could have developed a sizable and devoted following if left to their own devices, and it's still a mystery to me why IRS felt compelled to meddle with them in an attempt to acheive crossover success. The stresses from that experience were clearly too much for the band, and so their career ended after only two albums and an EP. I still feel like they had a fairly unique voice——they're one of those bands that, if they had never existed before and they put out their records today, would be hailed as the creators of a new sound——and it would have been fun to see where they would have gone if they had been able to make a few more records. Oh well. I'm just thankful we have Three Squares.
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8.30.04
I just realized that the music for the alphabet song is "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". Am I the only one that missed this? |
8.31.04
It's weird: Clinic's Winchester Cathedral and Drive-By Truckers' The Dirty South both suffer, upon initial listen, from sounding a little too much like the bands' previous work, but whereas I'm having to force myself to listen to The Dirty South (it's not a bad record, I just don't think it's as strong as Southern Rock Opera or Decoration Day, and I have a lot of new stuff to listen to these days), I absolutely love Winchester Cathedral. Many of Clinic's new songs are actually more derivative of their earlier work than the new Drive-By Truckers, but for some reason the cleaner production and new twists keep the songs fresh. It's kind of like Sam Raimi's Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2: they're basically the same movie, only the second one was shot with a bigger budget and with the experience gained from making the first one, and even though it's heresy in some circles to say so, I've always preferred Evil Dead 2. Same thing with Winchester Cathedral: I know that I should prefer the raw, pioneering sound of Internal Wrangler or the bizarro-cool of Walking With Thee (and I do really like those records), but I have a feeling Winchester Cathedral is going to end up being my favorite Clinic offering to date. |
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