notes - archives - october 2004

10.1.04
I went to the Record & Tape Traders close to campus on my lunch break yesterday to pick up Brian Wilson's Smile, and here is my experiece: In addition to Smile, I was also looking to pick up Interpol's Antics, Ben Harper's collaboration with the Blind Boys of Alabama, There Will Be a Light, and the new solo disc from Panda Bear (he's a member of Animal Collective) called Young Prayer.

Since all of the discs are new, and all but Panda Bear are popular enough to make it onto the wall o' CDs behind the counter, I head up to the racks to see if they happen to have it in stock, although I'm not optimistic based on my previous experiences with relatively obscure new releases. And I'm right: it's not on the shelves. So I head back down to the counter, and after waiting for five minutes behind a guy who is insistent that somebody find him a copy of a record that hasn't been released yet, it's my turn at the register and I ask the girl behind the counter to get me the other three CDs on my list. She finds the Interpol and Ben Harper with no problem, but then gets stuck on the Brian Wilson: there aren't any behind the counter that she can see, and the space on the new release rack that is reserved for Smile is empty. She checks the computer, which says they have 30 in stock, and, because there are now three or four people waiting behind me, I say that I'll go check the racks if she'll hold my other two CDs so she can take care of other customers.

I make my way back up the stairs and discover, of course, that there aren't any copies on the racks, either. Then I notice that, in the back, there are two employees opening new boxes of CDs, and I figure that one of them must surely hold the 30 copies of Smile that were showing in the computer inventory. I ask them if they can quickly cut open the remaining boxes (there are only five or so) and grab me a copy of Smile, and while one of them argues with me and says the best they can do is hold a copy for me, the other one opens the boxes and finds a complete shipment of Smile in the second box he tries. He hands it to me, I say thanks, and I make my way back down to the checkout counter.

Of course, there are three people in line ahead of me, so I wait another five minutes or so before it's my turn to pay again. As I hand her my copy of Smile, I stupidly ask her if they have Panda Bear behind the counter (those of you who know me and know my aversion for all things cute and cuddly can imagine the difficulty I had asking a hipper-than-thou record store employee about an artist named Panda Bear). She looks, doesn't find it, and then consults the computer, which tells her that they have one copy in stock. The guy who helpfully located Smile for me is now behind the counter as well and he offers to help me find Young Prayer, so I again abandon my place in line and head back up to the racks with him. He looks in the same place I did, doesn't find it just like I didn't find it, and says that either the computer is wrong or it has been misplaced.

Empty-handed, I return to the line, which of course has grown to five people by now, and after another 5-10 minutes of waiting my turn, I finally get to the counter, pay for my purchases, and head down to Silk Road for lunch. But I haven't learned a thing: I've now convinced myself that the Panda Bear must have been in the boxes that they were unpacking, and so I'll be back in there this afternoon to look for it again. You think at some point I'd just suck it up and order this stuff online.

Incidentally, they had a preview copy of William Shatner's new Ben Folds-produced CD, Has Been, playing on the store sound system the whole time I was in there, and while I'm not yet convinced that I'm going to spend good money on this despite my unreasonable affection for his cover of "Common People", hearing some other cuts off the disc didn't convince me that I'm not going to buy it, either. Lord help me.

10.4.04
You know, before last week, I had only been to two concerts in the last four years: Modest Mouse at some fly-by-night venue down in south Baltimore in 2000, and Godspeed You Black Emperor! at the Scottish Rite Freemason Temple just north of the Hopkins campus in 2003. But since then, I've doubled that, seeing the Decemberists last Sunday at the Recher and then the Fiery Furnaces and Wilco at the Meyerhoff last Tuesday.

I'd never been to the Meyerhoff before, but a symphony hall seems like a great place for a Wilco show. I had forgotten to go online early on the day the tickets went on sale, and by the time I remembered late in the afternoon, the only thing left was the far right balcony. Still, the way the Meyerhoff is arranged, we had a great view of the stage, even though we were three levels up, and I wasn't at all unhappy about the seats we ended up with.

I was concerned about the acoustics, though——the way the speakers were stacked, it looked like the sound was designed primarily for the people with floor tickets or who were sitting in the balcony levels directly opposite the stage, because there didn't seem to be any pointing even remotely in our direction. When the Fiery Furnaces came on (ten minutes early, before almost anyone had made their way to their seats——they didn't even turn off the house lights for them until halfway through their set), this was confirmed——all of the instrumentation sounded muddy, the singer's voice was echoey and faint, and the only instrument you could hear distinctly was the drum kit (which makes sense, since that's the most acoustic of the modern rock band instruments——the drums don't really need to be amplified, especially in a symphony hall).

The Furnaces played a blistering set, 50 minutes straight without a break, mixing and matching bits of songs from Blueberry Boat, sometimes re-using the same song throughout the set, sometimes only using a few bars from a song before abandoning it. It was like a punk rock version of the album, sped up, thrown in a blender, and attacked by the band. Among the songs that I'm pretty sure I recognized were "Quay Cur", "Straight Street", "Blueberry Boat", "Chris Michaels", "My Dog Was Lost But Now He's Found", "Mason City", "Chief Inspector Blancheflower", "Spaniolated", "1917", "Birdie Brain", and "Wolf Notes". That's pretty much all of Blueberry Boat, so I wouldn't be surprised if they played snippets from every song; I have no idea if they worked in any of Gallowsbird's Bark because I don't own that yet.

I don't know if I really like this approach, since the recorded versions of the songs have so many interesting twists that were lost in that performance, but the acoustics and the mix was so awful that I don't know if the band was mutilating their songs or if the venue was butchering the band's sound. But I love Blueberry Boat so much that I'm probably going to go catch the Furnaces later this month at the Ottobar when they return to Baltimore as headliners. I had my doubts about whether they'd made any new fans as a result of that set, but I ran into a friend from Hopkins and her husband in the lobby while Wilco was setting up, and although they agreed that the sound was terrible, they were so intrigued by the band that they bought Blueberry Boat in the lobby and were definitely insterested in seeing the band in a smaller venue more suited to their sound.

Tomorrow: the main act.

10.5.04
Okay, no Wilco recap today. But I will say this: seeing them in concert, you realize just how much influence Jim O'Rourke had on the band, and how much influence Wilco may have had on Sonic Youth's Sonic Nurse (O'Rourke is the newly annointed fifth member of Sonic Youth, and he produced both bands' last couple records). Wilco has learned the fine art of the feedback squall, and while it was a novelty on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it is part of the fabric of pretty much every song on A Ghost Is Born and they use it to great effect in their live show, taunting and teasing washes of noise from their instruments the same way a sorcerer can conjure a storm out of thin air. And from Wilco, Sonic Youth has remembered that a closer adherence to cleaner song structures is what made their albums of the late 80s so great. Even though the tracks on Sonic Nurse clock in at an average of six minutes or so, you never lose interest, because amidst the dissonance and sonic angularity there are enough hooks to keep you engaged. Wilco is more traditionally pop, and Sonic Youth remain purposefully arty, but both Ghost and Sonic Nurse share the same sensibility and they both succeed in their own way.

10.6.04
I swear I will finish the Wilco write-up someday. Just not today. Or tomorrow. Or the next day, either, because I'm going to be out of town for a few days. And it probably won't be worth the wait, because the reason I'm not finishing it isn't because it's this super-spectacular review, it's just not high on my priority list.

In the meantime, have a look at the setlist:

Hell Is Chrome
Handshake Drugs
Muzzle Of Bees
I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
Company In My Back
Hummingbird
A Shot In The Arm
Ashes Of American Flags
Jesus, Etc.
War On War
Via Chicago
Theologians
I'm The Man Who Loves You
Poor Places
At Least That's What You Said

Encore 1
Wishful Thinking
Spiders (Kidsmoke)

Encore 2
The Late Greats
I'm A Wheel
Kingpin
Passenger Side
California Stars
Be Not So Fearful

10.11.04
No music since last Thursday because I was out of town and couldn't ever seem to remember to charge up my iPod in the rental car. Surprisingly, I think I missed Bjork the most.

10.12.04
If you want to understand how far Brian Wilson was ahead of his time with Smile and how much seemingly unrelated acts like the Fiery Furnaces and Animal Collective are in his debt, try listening to the Furnaces' "Blueberry Boat" followed by Wilson's "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow", or Animal Collective's "College" followed by Wilson's "Our Prayer". If that sequence doesn't lay it out pretty clearly for you, I'm not sure that anything ever will.

10.13.04
Man. I didn't realize that Elliott Smith's final record, From a Basement on the Hill, was out already. I'm a little hesitant to buy it, not because I think it will be bad, but just because the story behind it is so creepy (for those of you who don't know, Smith committed suicide by stabbing himself in the heart while putting the finishing touches on the tracks for this album). It kills me when I listen to Figure 8, his last record, and I think this one will just naturally be more emotional because of finality of it. I'll probably buy it before the end of the week, but maybe I'll save it for a quiet rainy weekend when I'm not so angry about work and stressed out about my lack of free time.

10.14.04
Blueberry Boat just keeps getting better and better. It's part of a larger shuffle of albums that I've been listening to on the iPod for the past week or so, and although I really like the other albums in the mix, too, but every time a new song starts to play, I find myself secretly hoping that it will be from the Fiery Furnaces.

10.15.04
I've hesitated to buy Rilo Kiley's new record, More Adventurous, because the clips I've heard don't do a whole lot for me and there have been so many other new releases that I'm eager to have, but the iPod threw up a few of their songs from The Execution of All Things, and now I'm thinking I'll have to give it a shot after all. There are some really gorgeous little pop songs on that album that I had almost completely forgotten about.

10.18.04
By the way, I was wrong: Elliott Smith's From a Basement on the Hill isn't due out until tomorrow. I know I saw it for sale on iTunes last week because I listened to some tracks and that was what spurred the entry on Smith last week, but that must have been a mistake by Apple, because it's not there anymore. Actually, I think what really happened is that the album was pushed back a week and the record company just forgot to update Apple, so some fans were able to download what amounts to a preview copy last week before the mistake was discovered and the label asked Apple to withdraw the tracks until next week. But whatever; it should be available everywhere on Tuesday.

10.18.04
So this site had its first anniversary yesterday, and that, of course, got me thinking about its future. When I started the site, I had this idea that a lot of the content would derive from the year mixtape series (a lot of the first month or so of entries had to do with the 1986 mixtape), which, if I did one a month, would keep the site going for at least a couple of years. Of course, here we are a year later, and I'm only halfway through 1987 and I have no idea when I'll even finish that one, much less start plowing through the remaining years.

But it's not too hard to generate content for the site, especially given my almost-weekly CD purchases, and while the entries sometimes feel a little thin to me, I don't think I would want to shut down this site and roll all of those thoughts back into the content on my primary blog, because that would put too much music-related content on that blog.

So I guess I'll give this another year and see how I feel about it then, and also try to work on revitalizing my year mixtape series. Thanks to everyone who's become a regular reader over the past year; hopefully you all find some worthwhile nuggets every once in a while.

10.19.04
The iPod was insistent on playing tons of Beth Orton today. Don't know what was up with that, but at least it stuck mostly with the first couple of albums. Oh, and if the iPod gods are listening, you can ease up on the Animal Collective, too? How about you concentrate a little more on the Faint and Les Savy Fav——I've been more in the mood for that kind of stuff recently.

10.20.04
A few new purchases: Robyn Hitchcock's Spooked, the Black Keys' The Rubber Factory, and Tom Waits' Real Gone. Robyn Hitchcock is one of my favorite artists of all time, and while this album has some good moments, it's not really a great addition to his catalog. The Rubber Factory isn't as good as Thickfreakness, but it's a lot more varied and is worth hearing just because it expands the range of the Keys' sound. Real Gone I like a lot, but there's practically nothing that Waits has done in the past 20 years that I don't love.

Anyway. I'll probably pick up a few more this week——Le Tigre and Elliott Smith both have new ones, and I'm still search for the Arcade Fire——but after those and maybe the new U2, I think the releases that I'm interested in are mostly done for the year. But that's okay——I've been so busy recently that I haven't had time to properly absorb a lot of the stuff I've purchased in the last six weeks.

10.21.04
After listening to Smile for a few weeks now, I have come to the conclusion that this re-recorded version is still really good just because the songs are great and Brian Wilson's new band the Wondermints do a great job of imitating the 60s-era Beach Boys, but I'm still comparing these new versions to the bootlegs of the mastertapes of the original Smile sessions, and they just don't measure up. Wilson's voice is so much stronger on those original tapes, and while the production on the new recordings apes the originals as much as possible, there's still no doubt that these were recorded with modern studio equipment.

I'd rather have this than nothing at all, and it's still undoubtedly one of the best releases of the year, but I'm alwyas going to wonder how this album would have come out if Brian Wilson had gone back and used the original masters as his building blocks instead of redoing everything from scratch with contemporary musicians and equipment.

10.22.04
So: the Wilco show.

First off, for those of you who think I have a superperfect memory and an in-depth knowledge of Wilco's entire catalog to be able to quote back Wilco's setlist of 23 songs that night, well, I don't. And I'm not geeky enough to carry a notepad with me to a show (although I must admit I did that for a Modest Mouse show a few years ago), but somebody is, and I just took advantage of their obsessiveness to supplement my own memory. If you go back and review the setlist, you'll see that they played everything from A Ghost Is Born except "Less Than You Think", and most of the other tracks were from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, with occasional numbers from Summer Teeth, Being There, A.M., and even the Mermaid Avenue sessions with Billy Bragg.

The show, of course, was great. Jeff Tweedy seemed to be in a pretty good mood, bantering and joking with the crowd throughout the set and seeming really at ease. During "Via Chicago", which is a quiet, melancholy number to begin with, there is a passage near the end where Tweedy sings a few lines a capella, and an overly enthusiastic fan took this opportunity to let out a "woo!" or two. After the song was over, Tweedy said something to the effect of, "That's such a rock show move, I'm singing all quiet and serious and then we get a 'woo'". The he paused for a second and said, "Don't do it again."

Wilco played a decent number of songs for their first set——15——but it felt so much shorter because the performance was so compelling. They came back out for their first encore and did only two songs, but one of them was the lengthy "Spiders (Kidsmoke)", so it was still a good 15-20 minutes. I didn't know if they would come back for a second encore, but not only did they come back, they played 6 more songs, including one of my favorite tracks from Mermaid Avenue, "California Stars".

The band had a big screen set up behind them that played repetitive, hallucinatory sequences of videos clips from each song. They seemed to fall into one of two main categories: shots of Chicago buildings taken from a moving vehicle, or insects/flowers. They added a nice effect to the show, and were almost as effective as the multimedia presentation that accompanied Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s transcendent performance at the Freemason temple in Baltimore last year.

The best shows are always the ones where you see or hear something in the performance that gives you new insight into the band or one of their pieces, and this was certainly the case with this show. My biggest revelation was probably hearing "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" performed live. This song clocks in at nearly 11 minutes on the CD, and it took at least that long live, but while the CD version has always seemed to drag a little bit to me, the way they played it that night felt like it took three minutes. There are a couple of points in the song where the band abruptly shifts from a more laid-back, pulsing groove to a sharp attack of guitar chords, and now I understand exactly what those breaks are for. I had had a really bad day at work that day, and I was really pissed off at some of the idiots in our IT organization, and when those guitars kicked in, it was incredibly cathartic. They just made perfect sense, and when the song was over, a lot of the anger had drained out of me; it was like being able to spend 15 minutes with a punching bag.

In closing: great show. Great band. Go see them if you have the chance. But if you're even a semi-regular reader of this site, you should already know that.

10.25.04
The playlist I've been listening to for the past week on my iPod is a random shuffle of all the music I own that was released in 2004, but it's not nearly as varied as I would like. Thanks to a new album by the Cure and the four-disc retrospective box set Join the Dots, along with three remixes of Jay-Z's The Black Album (The Grey Album by Dangermouse, The Double Black Album by Cheap Cologne, and The Slack Album by DJ N-Wee), it seems like every other song is by one of these two artists. But I've been leaving it on anyway because it has also been mixing in a lot of the Fiery Furnaces and Les Savy Fav.

10.26.04
After Ashlee Simpson's ridiculously pathetic "performance" on SNL this weekend, let us have a moment of silence to commemorate the official death of corporate pop.

Amen.

10.27.04
Now let's have a genuince moment of silence for John Peel, the legendary British DJ who passed away earlier this week. His radio show spawned countless The Peel Sessions EPs and helped launch the careers of bands like New Order, the Smiths, Nirvana, Blur, the Clash, Pulp, the White Stripes, and too many others to list. There aren't many people like him left in the music industry, and he will be sorely missed.

10.28.04
Recently I've been relying way too much on my 4 or 5 star playlist on the iPod, which tends to be light on new material. And although the novelty of listening to great song after great song and not knowing what I would get next was great, I've found that it's really hard to get to know the newer albums I've bought because, even when I listen to a playlist made up primarily of new songs, I still listened to them shuffled so I never get a good feel for the album as a whole. So, for the next couple of weeks, I'm going to try listening with the shuffle-by-album feature enabled, so I'll still get a good mix of music throughout the day, but I'll listen to albums in their totality instead of mixed up in bits and pieces.

10.29.04
All the critics seem obsessed with working hip-hop references into their reviews of Tom Waits' new record, Real Gone, but I just don't hear it. I mean, he incorporates some samples and beatboxing into a couple of the songs, but they've been run through the Tom Waits filter, so their links to their hip-hop origins are pretty distant. The critics also like to harp on the lack of piano, acting as if that's his primary instrument and it's a whole new thing for him to go without. Truth is, Waits' primary instrument is his voice, and after that it's a guitar, and I doubt I would have even thought about the absence of a piano if every review I read of the record didn't spend at least a couple of sentences on it.

Real Gone is a great Tom Waits record (probably his best of the four releases he's put out in the last five years after taking an extended hiatus for six years in the 90s), and it definitely incoporates some new sonic textures. But it's not the radical departure that the reviewers would lead you to believe.