notes - archives - april 2005

4.4.05
I really hate it when Pitchfork runs reviews for records weeks before they're released (which they've done recently for Bloc Party and New Order). Yes, we know you're really important and you get advanced copies, and yes, we know you like to flaunt how cool you are for being tired of a record by the time it's officially released. But really, what good does it do? How does it help the band? Existing fans just get irritated because they get fooled into thinking they can run right out and get it, and new listeners who might buy the record based on your recommendation will forget about it by the time it's released. You actually might be costing the band a few record sales by doing this, and I don't think that's the outcome they wanted when they sent you the advance copy.

4.5.05
I miss that I don't have hours to spend poring over the lyric sheets, lists of credits, and artwork that bands include in their packaging. I used to get so disappointed when I would open a CD case and there was nothing but a single sheet with the album cover on one side and a song list on the other; getting to know the extra material the band included with the music was as important in the process of getting to know the record as the music itself.

But now I get a new CD, pop it in the CD drive, burn it to iTunes/iPod, and promptly file it away, rarely pulling it out to look at anything that might have been included with the CD booklet. Combined with the near-irresistible temptation to throw new music into a larger shuffled playlist, and it's no surprise that recently I've been having a harder and harder time getting a real sense for an album as a discrete entity (this is likely why I stopped writing formal reviews for Plug, which is pretty much dead at this point).

I'm not sure what to do about this, really. I don't really have a need to have an opinion about a record as a whole, and even good bands whose music I like 99% of the time are increasingly including mediocre material that I have no desire to waste my time with. But I really do miss that sense of headspace that albums used to create, the way they could carve out their own little niche in some corner of my brain and become forever linked to a certain time, a certain place, a certain person.

4.6.05
Going away for a week, and though I'll have my trusty iPod with me, I won't be able to load anything new on it til I get back. I was hoping to get Beck's Guero before leaving, but that's not going to happen. Too bad, really——from what I've heard so far, it would be a good accompaniment to south Florida's sun and sleaze. Oh well. I'll have to pick that up when I get back, along with the new Architecture in Helsinki. I'm also intrigued by the new Love Tractor; they have been longtime favorites of mine, but I'm not sure if I'm going to like Black Hole based on the samples I've heard so far. But I'm sure I'll end up buying it anyway.

4.14.05
So we are now a two-iPod household; without any foreknowledge on my part, my wife snuck away after work yesterday and bought herself one of the iPod shuffles, the larger one that holds a gig. I think she got jealous after our recent trip when the battery died on her XM2go on the plane flight down, but I was able to recharge my iPod so that I had enough juice to transfer a few dozen photos to it to clear off my camera's memory card, and still listen to my music on the flight back home. It's a pretty cool little thing——it really is the size of a pack of gum——and although it was a little impulsive, I probably would have bought one at some point myself, and she'll actually use it whereas I would have bought it more for the gizmo factor.

On a related note, I also finally passed the 100-songs-purchased mark on iTunes. The Eels' live album Electro Shock Blues Show pushed me to exactly 100, and for 101 I bought the Karen O. (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and Squeak E. Clean collaboration "Hello Tomorrow", which you would probably recognize as the soundtrack to the trance-inducing Adidas commercial where a guy in bed goes running and keeps falling into different dreamscape environments. My wife really likes that song, but I didn't tell her I bought it and secretly loaded it onto her shuffle, so hopefully it will be a nice surprise when it pops up in her playlist.

4.15.05
I really, really love the first two Sparklehorse albums, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot and Good Morning Spider, though I never really took to their third release, It's a Wonderful Life. But the title track has one of my favorite lines: "I'm full of bees/Who died at sea." I have only a vague sense of what that means, but it's one of the weirdest images Mark Linkous ever threw into a song lyric, and it charms me every time I hear it.

4.18.05
I finally went to the record store this weekend to catch up on some new releases and finally spend the $50 gift certificate I got for Christmas, and imagine my surprise when they had all five of my top choices in stock. Granted, all of them are by reasonably high-profile artists, but there have been plenty of times in the past when I've gone and found that a CD that by all rights should be the bread and butter of an independent record store is not only not in stock, but they don't even have it in their distribution channel.

Anyway, here's what I got: Beck's Guero, the Books' Lost and Safe, British Sea Power's Open Season, Out Hud's Let Us Never Speak of It Again, and Architecture in Helsinki's In Case We Die. I'll write mini-reviews of each of these sometime in the near future, but for now, just let me say that comparing the official album versions of the four songs on Guero that Beck released remixes of on an exclusive iTunes EP a month before the record hit the streets, the remix versions win hands down. The album versions seem slick, calculated, and nearly souless when played alongside the raw, gritty, and loose iTunes versions. I still think it's a pretty good album, though.

4.19.05
This is kind of interesting: Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has released a high-quality version of a track from the band's upcoming record in GarageBand format, meaning Mac users with version 2.0 or greater of the software can get a very detailed look at the song's construction. You can view all the different tracks Trent used to weave together the final composition (there are 17 in all), see all the different segments that go into each of those tracks, and also mute any of the tracks so that you can listen to only the percussion elements in the song, or isolate the lead vocals and the guitar parts.

Trent is probably hoping to build same kind of buzz that Jay-Z got from releasing only his vocals from The Black Album, which resulted in dozens of mash-ups that combined his rhymes with music from other artists, because this essentially allows anyone with a Mac purchased in the past couple of years to easily remix his song, add new elements, and release it to the internet. But even if fans don't do this (and you can bet real money that they will), I still wish more artists would release songs in formats like this——it really gives a unique look into the song-writing and song-creation process and allows you to explore the music in a whole new way.

4.20.05
Not real fond of the new Architecture in Helsinki, In Case We Die, even though their quirky debut, Fingers Crossed, was one of my favorite CDs from last year. I think it's pretty telling that Pitchfork, which gave high marks to that CD, hasn't even reviewed the new one even though it's been out in the US for three weeks already.

4.21.05
Out Hud don't sound like I expected them to. Sort of a latter-period Lucious Jackson crossed with recent Le Tigre, with a little more disco thrown in. I like some of the tracks, but I haven't convinced myself yet that I like the music as a whole.

4.22.05
Man, I wish selling your music to advertisers still had the same stigma it did back in the 80s, when R.E.M. still knew how to play a rock song and Bono's grandiose earnestness seemed sort of endearing. But now, it's Modest Mouse hawking minivans aimed at overachieving soccer moms, the Shins shilling for McDonald's french fries, and now Jane's Addiction becoming the soundtrack for Coors' latest round of macho bullshit ads. Sure, the chorus for that song is "Cash in now, honey/Cash in now", but when they were singing it back in '89, they were being ironic. It's all just wrong, wrong, wrong, but nobody seems to care anymore.

4.25.05
Pre-iPod, the way that I would choose what music I would be listening to on any given day (which was usually any given week, because I only went throught this exercise once every week or two) was to comb through my CD case (which held 24 CDs), purge the ones I had gotten tired of listening to, and then go to my shelves of CDs and find the same number of discs to replace the ones that I just removed from the rotation. Because of this, I was very in tune with my entire collection; at least a couple of times a month my eyes would run past a CD and at least consider it briefly for inclusion in the rotation, and I always tried to get a mix of things that I hadn't listened to in a while even though I loved them and things that I didn't feel like I knew as well as I should.

But for all intents and purposes, post-iPod my music collection consists only of those discs that have been transferred to iTunes, which is at most a quarter of my total collection, and it tends to be the most recent quarter because the first thing I do when I get home with a new CD now is to import it into iTunes. There have been a couple of times when I have gone back and purposefully added CDs that are among my all-time favorites (I believe that everything I rank a 10 is in iTunes at this point), but I'm still missing the vast majority of the CDs that ranked 7 or better from the last millenium. I add in a lot of my favorites when I do the year mixtapes, but as you can see, we're 18 months into this site and I'm only about halfway through the second one.

Even if it were possible to have all my music in iTunes (my current collection is far too big to fit into my current iPod), I know that I would still tend to listen to songs via playlists; I just don't listen to whole albums anymore because it takes so much time to scroll through and find just the right record, especially when I know that I have a playlist that, while not necessarily feeding me a particular album, will give me music to suit my current mood.

I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say here, except that my listening habits have changed dramatically since I got my iPod, and as much as I love it, I still sometimes miss the way I used to interact with my collection.

4.26.05
I just realized last night that it has been six months since U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb came out, and the only song I can recognize from it is "Vertigo", which I remember more from its heavy usage in the iPod ad campaign than I do from the record itself. I had big hopes for this disc, but it's looking more and more like All That You Can't Leave Behind may have been the band's last decent album.

4.27.05
I remember when TV on the Radio's first full-length, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, came out, there was a lot of ink spilled over at Pitchfork comparing the album version of "Staring at the Sun" with the version on their debut EP, Young Liars. I tell you what, though, I've listened and listened, and I can't really tell a difference. It's a good song, but not their best, and I'm not really sure why it was designated for inclusion on both releases.

4.28.05
I wish more bands would play around with the 3/4 time signature. Very soothing, that one.

4.29.05
It was LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" that originally drew me in, but it's "Thrills", "Disco Infiltrator", and "Tribulations" that keep me coming back.