notes - archives - july 2005

7.5.05
It's hard to find stuff to write about when there's just not that much good stuff being released. I swear, on the off chance that I found myself in a record store these days, the only thing I'd be looking for is a copy of the Hold Steady's first record, Almost Killed Me. Well, that, and a copy of Sufjan Stevens' Illinois, but that was just released today so it hardly counts for the purposes of this rant.

7.6.05
Well, it looks like I won't be getting the new Sufjan Stevens anytime soon. Apparently DC Comics issued a cease and desist order to his record label because there was an unauthorized image of Superman on the album cover, and the label was forced to recall them from stores before they went on sale (of course, there are now tons of overpriced copies available on eBay). So either the label has to come to some sort of agreement with DC, or else they have to print new cover art and repackage all of the existing CDs before releasing the record to stores.

You know, if this doesn't tell you what's wrong with the copyright laws in this country, I don't know what will. Superman was first created in 1938, nearly 70 years ago, and his creators are long dead. He is an iconic American image, one of the most well-known superheroes in the world thanks to the countless comics, tv shows, movies, and video games based on the character. And yet his likeness is still entirely owned by a corporation, so even though he has been deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, no one can use this image for their own commentaries on that culture without the express permission (and, one assumes, compensation) of DC Comics (I'm guessing parody would be the exception, since the art of humor seems to recieve special protections that other art forms do not). Stupid, stupid, stupid. Pretty soon the corporations will be suing us over negative CD reviews.

7.7.05
Craig Finn of the Hold Steady is a sort of weird hybrid of Paul Westerberg, Bruce Springsteen, and Mark Sandman. And he's my new hero.

7.8.05
Gonna go hunting for the new Sufjan Stevens this weekend, as the record company has authorized stores to sell the copies that they already have in stock. They won't be able to restock from the warehouse until the cover art issues get settled, which means if I don't get it now I might have to wait another month, but I'm hoping I can dig up a copy somewhere around here. In the meantime, I've downloaded two bonus tracks from iTunes, which shockingly don't require you to purchase the whole album in order to get access to the iTunes exclusives (which is the usual practice...grrr). Like what I'm hearing so far, so hopefully the rest of the album will meet my expectations as well.

7.11.05

Mixtape: 1987

Track 14
"No New Tale to Tell"
Earth, Sun, Moon
Love and Rockets

There was a time, however brief, when Love and Rockets occupied a special place in my heart. I fell in love with their second album, Express, whose strange optimism and casual references to non-western spirituality were in perfect harmony with my adolescent mind (although, not yet acquainted with Bauhaus, the band from which Love and Rockets was born, I can understand why fans of the earlier group pledged allegiance to frontman Peter Murphy's baroque darkness and forever swore off the psychedelic sunshine of Daniel Ash and David J). The follow-up to Express, Earth, Sun, Moon, featured a lot of Beatles-esque acoustic guitars, a more polished production, and songwriting that was radio-friendly enough to score the band a minor American hit with the single "No New Tale to Tell", which was quite a feat in the pre-Nirvana days where the bands on college radio and the bands on the top 40 almost never overlapped.

I actually went to see Love and Rockets when they toured behind this record, and that was the first glimpse I got of the future of alternative music. Their opening act was the still-unsigned Jane's Addiction, who blew the headliners off the stage. After an overpowering set by the Janes that left the audience breathless and stunned, Love and Rockets took the stage for a very short set in which they seemed irritable and not-quite-there. Daniel Ash in particular was pretty pissed, sometimes swapping out guitars four or five times in a single song and never seeming any happier with the replacement than he was with the one that came before, and there was a palpable sense that, however high they might be on the charts at the moment, the band knew that this was their high-water mark, and they were desperately trying not to slide back down the ladder. This actually wasn't the high point of their career in America; their next record, the self-titled Love and Rockets, went gold and spawned an even bigger hit single in "So Alive". But still, touring with a band like Jane's Addiction has to do something to highlight your own shortcomings——the audience that came to see Love and Rockets that night certainly came away more impressed with the openers than the main act, and that couldn't have escaped Daniel Ash and company.

I used to really like Earth, Sun, Moon, but over time, it's charms have dimmed and I found myself nearly unable to select a song from it for this mix, simply because I couldn't find one that still meant enough to me to include it here. Really, the only reason the band made this mix is because they were really popular among my peer group (and me, too) back in 1987, and I have a lot of vivid memories of that concert. "No New Tale to Tell" was as good as song to choose as any on here, and it gets an extra boost for being one of the most recognizable tunes from their catalog. I don't know quite what was lost between 1987 and now, but considering how much fondness I still have for most the stuff I was listening to at that point in my life, it's very curious that this one record has little or no emotional effect on me today. But I still love Express.

7.12.05

Mixtape: 1987

Track 15
"Big Decision"
Babble
That Petrol Emotion

That Petrol Emotion never had the time in the sun that they deserved, a fate shared by such contemporaries as House of Freaks, Game Theory, and Julian Cope, among many others. A five-piece with a mostly stable lineup of three Irishmen (two of whom were brothers), one Scot, and an American vocalist with a Scottish last name, they trafficed in politcally-oriented rock back when you could do that sort of thing with a straight face. The harmonics of the band remain unique in my mind, their signature sound defined by interweaving guitar lines that run the gamut from serpentine to angular. The drumming was tough and muscular, and the sinewy guitars added a touch of menace to many of their best tracks.

Babble was the band's first release in the US, although they had released the sometimes-stunning but often hit-and-miss Manic Pop Thrill the year before in their native UK. They would go on to release five albums total before calling it quits in 1994, and all of them still have their charms today. End of the Millenium Psychosis Blues, which was supposed to be their breakthrough record, is the weakest of the bunch, but surprisingly, Fireproof, their swan song, finds the group in top form, and you have to wonder at the timing of their disbanding, especially given the swarms of indie guitar bands that were finding mainstream success at the time.

"Big Decision" was the big single for this record, and it's uncharacteristicly upbeat despite the anti-big business tirades tucked away in the lyrics. I prefer the more agitated sounds of "Swamp", "Split", or "Creeping to the Cross", but there's hardly a weak track on this record, and "Big Decision" wins because of it's A-side status and because it's friendlier pop overtones fit in better with the overall tone of this mix.

For a while there in the early 90s, in the wake of Virgin signing the band, the cutout bins were practically overflowing with copies of Pyschosis Blues and its successor, Chemicrazy (a much more solid album, though unfortunately named, and one with enough hooks that it should have broken them to a larger audience), but you'd be hard pressed to find copies of these records now. The first two albums, including Babble, were reissued in the UK a few years back, so if you're lucky you might be able to dig up a CD version on one of the online sites. It's well worth it to try——the thundering drums, blistering guitars, and politcal rants make That Petrol Emotion the godfathers of bands like Rage Against the Machine, and you can still feel their flames still burning almost 20 years later. It's just a shame they're not around to pour more gasoline on the fire.

7.13.05

Mixtape: 1987

Track 16
"Ahead"
The Ideal Copy
Wire

I'm not going to do any research to back this up, I'm just going to say it: Wire is the most important band to come out of the punk/postpunk era of the mid to late 70s who are still active and recording today. They're on their third life now, exploring new territory initially broached by 2002's Read & Burn EPs (which culminated in the Send full length from 2003). The Ideal Copy, which came just over a decade into the band's existence, ushered in the band's second major phase, which substituted dense, complex sequences of beats and synthesizers for the abstract, mechanical guitarwork that were the group's hallmark up until that point. The guitars on The Ideal Copy, in contrast to their earliest records, are reflective gossamer threads that add the occasional moonlit spiderweb to the labrithine song structures, but do not anchor the songs in the way they did on, say, Pink Flag. The unrelenting teutonic forward-motion is still present, but on The Ideal Copy, it's the bass, drums, and sequencers that create the momentum.

Since I was still but a wee lad when Wire released their seminal early works, The Ideal Copy was my first exposure to the band, and although it was very different from most of what I was listening to at the time, I was instantly hooked: brainy, brawny, unyielding, and frail all at once. Looking back, I have to say that The Ideal Copy changed my view of music in the same way that Radiohead's OK Computer would 10 years later, and I could easily apply the same four descriptors to that album. (A more apt comparison might be Kid A, which found Radiohead pushing the ideas introduced on OK Computer to their extremes, to the point where the guitars almost became secondary. But I digress.)

"Ahead" opens with a grandiose series of four guitar notes repeated twice, and then charges ahead fearlessly with multiple staccato synth and drum tracks that give you the feeling of being on a train that is going dangerously fast. But even as the terrain is whipping past at hundreds of miles an hour, you find yourself calm and relaxed. "Who cares," you ask yourself, "if we're breaking the speed of sound? This machine is working so perfectly that there's no way anything can possibly go wrong."

7.14.05
Just in case you're wondering, my most-played song according to iTunes since that program started monitoring my music habits a couple of years ago is William Shatner's cover of Pulp's "Common People"——not the album version, the shorter, unofficial version that leaked to the internet a few months before the release of the album. This doesn't especially shock me——when I first got ahold of that song, I would put it on endless repeat while I was working——I just never got tired of it. It cruises to the top spot with a stunning 65 plays, beating the second place song, the Decemberists' "July, July!" by 10. Then there are five songs with times-played in the 40s, and after that, things start to settle out a bit more——there are several dozen in the 30s, and a massive number in the 20s.

Surprisingly, many of those in the top 50 are from my two year mixtapes——I don't feel like I listened to those an excessive number of times while I was compiling the mixes or as I got around to writing about each individual song, but the stats tell otherwise. However, there are several newcomers making their way up the ranks, includinig Les Savy Fav, the Arcade Fire, and the Unicorns, so hopefully the upper echelons will be a little more balanced before too long.

7.15.05
One of the problems with using the iPod/iTunes as my exclusive music source right now means that I don't really listen to large numbers of great albums in my collection, simply because I haven't taken the time to digitize them yet. Everything I've purchased in the last three or four years is in there, because the first thing I do when I get a new CD is rip it to iTunes and load it to the iPod, and I've got a pretty good sampling from the earlier years of my collection thanks to the year mixtapes that I've been working on (I probably load 2-3 times as many CDs into iTunes than are represented on the final mix while putting the mix together). But in between 1987, which is the year of the most recent year mixtape, and 2002, which is when I started to listen to my music digitally, there are some huge gaps.

At one point I sat down and loaded every CD that I had ranked a 9 1/2 or 10 into iTunes, but that still leaves tons of good albums in the 7-9 range that I haven't listened to in a couple of years at this point. Yesterday I got a serious craving for Melvins' Stag, which remains the unparalled gem of their career, so I finally loaded that and have been listening to it non-stop since ("Skin Horse" is one of my favorite songs ever). But that was just a weird fluke; I don't know where that impulse came from, since I haven't had similar random cravings for other CDs that haven't been ripped into iTunes yet. I hardly even look at my CD collection anymore, because I have so much to listen to that's already at my fingertips in iTunes, but I think this weekend I'm going to take a long hard look at it and try to load in another large batch of Stag-quality records that I've turned my back on for too long now.

7.18.05
I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness is such a great name for a band, I'm thinking about buying their debut EP without listening to a note beforehand. But it doesn't hurt that the record was produced by Britt Daniels of Spoon and that they share rehearsal space with ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead.

7.19.05
It's time for an iPod revision, or a new model, or some new features, or something. It's been more than six months. We need new product, Apple. Not that we're necessarily going to buy it. We just need to know it's out there.

7.20.05
Whenever I'm struggling for something to write about and I don't have the energy/focus to finish the next entry in the year mixtape series, I always start digging around on iTunes, hoping I can find some exclusive track that I can justify buying because it's not available anywhere else. This tends to happen especially on Tuesdays, since that's when Apple loads the store up with new goodies, in some misguided attempt to ape the release schedule of a brick and mortar record store. But alas, there was nothing new for me there this week, and so you have to suffer with an entry that's just related enough to the topic of music to justify its inclusion on a site that calls itself a music blog. Sorry.

7.21.05
Very cool. A few weeks ago, one of you who reads this site sent me an email inquiring about my copy of the Screaming Blue Messiahs' Gun Shy to see if you might be able to get a copy since it has been out of print forever and copies on eBay are upwards of $60. Unfortunately, even though my copy plays fine on my stereo CD player (which I haven't turned on in I don't know how long), every CD reader I've tried it on is resistant to ripping the tracks. I'll get the first one or two, then it will get a couple of tracks with lots of skipping, and then it will just give up entirely.

But while I wasn't able to provide this person with a copy of that disc, he volunteered to send me a copy of Cactus World News' Urban Beaches, which was one of my favorite records in the mid-80s but which I have never been able to find on CD (it, too, will occasionally show up on eBay, and it's usually priced at $80 or higher). It arrived yesterday, and within minutes of receiving the package I had it ripped into iTunes and was happily getting reacquainted with songs that I hadn't heard in probably 15 years. So, thanks——it's great to have access to this music again, especially because it still sounds just as good as I remember.

7.22.05
The middle of the summer is turning into a dead period for good music releases that rivals the November-January holiday slump, when labels focus on their big-ticket acts and the smaller bands hole up in the studio to get material ready for a release that they can do a summer tour behind. I'm going hunting for some new stuff this weekend, but I'm not optimistic.

7.25.05
Usually when I got and pick up three or four new CDs, especially when they're from groups I haven't heard before, I hope for this: that no more than one of them is mediocre or worse, that they will all hopefully have something of interest for me, and that maybe one of them will be great. The four I picked up this weekend should easily surpass my minimal expectations, and they may in fact may be one of my best round of purchases yet. The CDs: Stars' Set Yourself on Fire, Death From Above 1979's You're a Woman, I'm a Machine, Shout Out Louds' Howl Howl Gaff Gaff, and Sufjan Stevens' Illinois.

Stars is the weakest of the bunch, and it's still pretty good——there are only a couple of songs that I didn't love on first listen, although they need to figure out if they'd rather steal primarily from Death Cab for Cutie or its offshoot, the Postal Service. They also borrow from Rilo Kiley, Broken Social Scene, the Arcade Fire, New Pornographers, Broadcast, etc. On the whole, though, a good effort, one whose meaning will likely deepen with time and repeated listenings.

Death From Above 1979 are simply amazing (the 1979 was appended to their name to make them legally distinct from the record label that has the same name after that label filed suit against the band), another two-piece like the White Stripes or the Black Keys that make a hell of a lot of noise. Catchy stuff, too——you can tell they've also been influenced by the Liars' first record. If you'd rather be angry about your recently terminated relationship than mope about it, this is the album for you.

Shout Out Louds was recommended to me by the same benefactor who sent me a copy of Cactus World News' Urban Beaches, and it was coincidentally playing on the record store's sound system while I was shopping. I hate buying stuff that they play, because it makes me feel like a tool, but whatever. It was well worth seeming like a wanna-be to the hipper-than-thou clerks to get my hands on this record. I don't know quite how to describe this CD——it's definitely pop-oriented and influnced by the 80s revival sound that's been building for the past few years, but not like anyone else in that semi-movement.

Sufjan Stevens was the only artist in this batch I'd heard before, following up his excellent Michigan with Illinois. I was actually pretty surprised to find this——the label initially recalled all copies of the CD due to copyright infringement issues with an image of Superman on the cover art, but then they said that record stores could sell what they had in stock but that the label couldn't ship any new copies until the dispute was resolved. It's been nearly three weeks since it was released, and I figured that any copies this store might have ordered were long-since gone. But there it was, sitting in the racks waiting to be purchased. Good for me, bad for the one other guy in my county who held off buying it right away. It's typical Sufjan, but typical Sufjan is out-of-this-world good.

So a good day of purchases all-in-all. I wouldn't be surprised if two of these made it onto my annual top 10, and the three that were released this year will all be in consideration (Death From Above 1979 came out last October, and likely would have made my list had I known about it then). If only all my music dollars could be spent so wisely...

7.26.05
I think I'm finally beginning to accept that Wild Mood Swings was the last decent album we're going to get from the Cure.

7.27.05
So when are the Fiery Furnaces going to get around to releasing some of those three albums they promised us this year? The clock's ticking, people, and we don't have a single release date yet.

7.28.05
Well t his is more like it. Or as a friend of mine said: "Damn, the Fiery Furnaces are your bitches."

7.29.05
You know, I thought that "Blue Orchid", the first single from the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan (and one of the only tracks on the record featuring any kind of noisy guitar) was a step in a new direction for Jack White, but after having listened to Death From Above 1979's You're a Woman, I'm a Machine (which was released last year) for the past few days, it occurs to me that he was probably just listening to this album a whole lot.