notes - archives - august 2005

8.1.05
I decided not to mow the lawn yesterday because my iPod wasn't charged and I couldn't stand the thought of cutting grass for 45 minutes without being able to listen to music at the same time. That's how integrated this device has gotten into my daily existence.

8.2.05
I don't think I'll ever like Beulah's swan song, Yoko, as much as I like The Coast Is Never Clear (which is one of my favorite records of all time), but it's slowly growing on me. The first half has definitely won me over completely, and the second half is well on its way.

8.3.05
I had never thought of this until last night when I mistook the opening of one of Bjork's Medullah tracks for the opening of a song from Sigur Ros' Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do, but it makes a whole lot of sense the both Bjork and Sigur Ros hail from Iceland.

8.4.05
I'm still not completely sold on Stars' Set Yourself on Fire (althouh there are several great individual tracks), but I'm terribly infatuated with the line from which the title is taken: "When there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire."

8.5.05
"All Clockwork and No Bodily Fluids Makes Hal A Dull Metal Humbert": it's as true today as it was in 1987, when Scott Miller made it up as a title for a Game Theory song collage on the Lolita Nation album.

8.8.05
I wonder if the fact that Whiskeytown's demos for Faithless Street and Stranger's Almanac are better than 90% of his solo output ever keeps Ryan Adams up at night?

8.9.05
For the love of god will someone please release some new music? This summer is killing me. This season is usually a semi-dead period, but man, this year has been as bad as the January-February window usually are.

8.10.05
I am reaching a critical decision point with my iPod. I've resisted mass copying of CDs into iTunes thus far, because I have far more music than will ever fit onto my 40 gig iPod, but just by loading discs for my year mixtapes and loading all of my new purchases, I am slowly but surely maxing out the capacity of the drive. I have 13 gigs left, but for the sake of disc performance and also so that my iPod will retain its functionality as a portable hard drive, I'm planning to leave 5 gigs of space free, meaning that I really only have 8 gigs of space left for music.

So when the songs I have loaded into iTunes start to exceed the amount of space I want to use on the iPod, I'll have to start manually deciding what should be loaded onto the iPod, which will become an ongoing process as I will have to continually clear older material to make room for new purchases; I will have to make some hard choices about whether or not an album is pod-worthy, to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld.

Here's how I'm initially going to approach it: I'll create a couple of new playlists, and have those automatically load to the iPod. One of these will contain everything I've loaded over, say, the past six or twelve months, a smart playlist that will automatically remove items as they pass their expiration dates. I will also have another manually updated playlist where I store each complete album that I rank fairly high. I will likely supplement these two primary playlists with several lesser playlists, like one that contains all of the individual songs I've rated at 4 or more stars (out of five).

I'm hoping that by using these strategies, which will likely have to be tweaked as the percentage of my collection that I have digitized grows, I'll be able to have all of the albums that really matter to me on hand, in addition to my most recently acquired discs that I'll still be getting to know and all of my favorite individual tracks.

Of course, Apple could solve this problem for me if they would just release an iPod with a 200 gig capacity...

8.11.05
Alright. For the next couple of days, I'm going to take my iPod off song shuffle mode and switch it to album shuffle on a playlist the includes my most recent purchases, none of which I have yet listened to in album form. I used to really love listening to discs in the exact form that their creators made them. Aside from making mixtapes for friends, I almost never listening to a record in a way other than the band had released it——I would rarely even put the CD player on shuffle. But now with the iPod, it's so hard to listen to a single disc all the way through, unless it particularly catches my fancy (the most recent album to do this was the Hold Steady's Separation Sunday).

I really think I'm missing something important about a record if I don't get to know it in the way that the band wanted me to, but I am weak, and the allure of the almighty shuffle is too strong. I've tried shuffling by album instead of song before, but I invariably end up back with song shuffle after only a few days. I'd really like to get to know some of my recent purchases better, though, so I'm going to try to give this a shot until at least next week. But I'm not optimistic that I'll be able to make it that long.

8.12.05
So the Happy Mondays are apparently hard at work on a new album. Which begs the question: Why?

8.15.05
Alright. Whenever I say something overly critical or unnecessarily snarky about a band, I always feel guiltily compelled to load a couple of their discs into iTunes and make sure that I'm still right with whatever obnoxious assesment I was making. This was the case after last Friday's post about the Happy Mondays: that night, I ripped Bummed and Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches onto my hard drive and gave them a serious listen. Bummed isn't all that impressive, but man, Pills is really good. I probably like it more now than I did when it was released, and I now remember liking it quite a bit back then.

But that still doesn't mean that their new record, if it actually surfaces, won't suck mightily.

8.16.05

Feeling wrong 'cause the days are too long...

Ah, Cibo Matto, why have you vanished from our lives?

8.16.05
Another perfectly loopy verse from that same song I quoted above ("Working for Vacation", from the stellar Stereotype A):

When I think of something it goes out to space
Then it comes back in another shape
We know we're not apes but we could make
Sweet seedless grapes

I couldn't explain it to you, but I know what it means.

8.17.05
On Tuesday, Death Cab for Cutie unveiled the most complicated trickery on the iTunes store I've yet seen. Their new album is due to be released on August 30, and like many bands, they'd like to use iTunes to generate some early buzz. Of course, most bands do this by either offering an exclusive pre-release single, or in rare cases, making the entire disc available for purchase a week or two before it hits the brick and mortar store shelves. Death Cab on the other hand, is allowing you to pre-purchase the new album, although you won't be able to download and listen to any of the songs until the official release date (there aren't even any sample clips to listen to; you can see the song titles, but there are no running times and when you click on them nothing plays).

So why do they expect people to pony up their cash two weeks early when they still won't get to listen to the music until everyone else does? Because they are bundling an exclusive pre-release track with this purchase, a track that will, according to the write-up on iTunes, no longer be available for purchase in any form after the official release date. I quite frankly have a hard time believing this; it might not be available immediately, but it's not going to stay shelved forever. However, at least give the band credit for understanding their obsessive, completist fan base that will likely buy this thing in droves just to make sure they don't miss their chance.

8.18.05
So maybe the bastards at Fiona Apple's record label weren't lying after all when they said it was her, not them, that was holding up the release of her third album: apparently, this is finally going to happen on October 4, but the official release will supposedly be substantially different than the version that was leaked to the internet earlier this year. The record will include all the tracks from the leaked version plus one new track, "Parting Gift", but all of te "original" tracks have been re-recorded and are supposedly markedly different songs now.

Fortunately, Fiona has availed herself of iTunes to restart the buzz on this record, and she is now offering pre-release versions of both "Parting Gift" and the reworked version of "O, Sailor". If the 30 second clip of "Parting Gift" is any indication of the strength of the whole song, it's likely going to be the weakest track on the album, and I'm guessing it was just included so there would at least be a smidgen of new material on the official release that wasn't part of the leak earlier this year. The reworked version of "O, Sailor" doesn't sound too much different, except that there are even more baroque orchestral flourishes than the Jon Brion version, if you can believe that.

Whatever. I'm not going to buy either of these tracks on iTunes, but I will be purchasing the record; even if I don't like this version as much as the one I already have thanks to the internet, I still feel obligated to give Fiona some money, because I've already gotten a lot of enjoyment from these songs.

8.19.05
Well, I've finally given up hope that my local indie record store chain will ever stock the Hold Steady's Almost Killed Me, even though they do stock their more recent release, Separation Sunday. And if they're not going to stock that release, I know there's no way in hell they're going to stock the two available CDs from frontman Craig Finn's earlier band, Lifter Puller, which I also want now that I've decided Craig Finn is this decade's Paul Westerberg (although hopefully without the limp dick flameout that the Replacements went through when they signed to a major label and stopped getting passing-out drunk during their shows).

So, I broke down and ordered them from Insound, who had Almost Killed Me in stock and who promised to get me the other two discs within two weeks. While I was there, I also ordered the eponymous debut from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, since I'm absolutely sure that this disc will never be stocked in any record store I have easy access to. I swear, I'm trying to support the local brick and mortars, but they sure don't make it easy on a guy.

8.22.05
I really wanted to like Architecture in Helsinki's sophomore effort, In Case We Die, because their debut, Fingers Crossed, was a real favorite of mine. But I just don't, and every time I try to give it another chance, I just get more and more annoyed that they didn't do better and I end up liking it less than I did before.

8.23.05
Gotta say I'm liking my first experience with Insound. Ordered on Thursday night, the two CDs that were in-stock were mailed out on Friday, and I got them yesterday. So after weeks of fruitless searching the local record stores, after only a few days, I have now added Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's eponymous debut and The Hold Steady's Almost killed Me to my collection. I've only listened to them once each so far, but I'm not regretting my purchase based on what I've heard so far.

8.24.05
There have been so many bands in the last couple of years vying for the title of the thinking man's post-millenial Duran Duran, not the least of which is Franz Ferdinand, who seem more determined than ever to fit that description based on "Do You Want To", the single from their forthcoming sophomore disc. But it occurs to me that, really, Duran Duran were the thinking man's Duran Duran. Until they started to suck. The only real point of debate is when that suckage occurred.

8.25.05
It looks like the Hold Steady's Separation Sunday is getting some well-deserved attention from the press, but it remains to be seen how much this will translate to album sales and wider exposure. Becauase unfortunately, their forays into mainstream media have so far come from two opposite ends of the spectrum, neither of which will convince a larger audience to give them a shot: a musical guest spot on Last Call with Carson Daly and a 10 minute segment on NPR.

I don't know anyone cool who watches Carson Daly——hell, I would never watch it unless I knew well in advance that a band like the Hold Steady were going to appear, and then I'd just TiVo it and skip to the end. And the folks at NPR have a way of making anything sound boring (on their web site, they've even included annotated lyrics so all their unhip intellectual listeners can see all the cool literary and cultural references in Craig Finn's lyrics without having to actually listen to the songs).

I knew the day I bought it that Separation Sunday was the best rock album that had been or would get released this year, but it's going to take more than an aging MTV doofus and the stuffed shirts at NPR to bring this album to the masses.

8.26.05
So far, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sounds like what I always imagined early Pavement must sound like. And I think that's a good thing.

8.29.05
I thought the first Black Rebel Motorcycle Club disc was okay, and I thought the second sounded enough like it that I didn't need to buy it. But based on the samples on iTunes from their latest, Howl (which is about as inappropriate an album title as I've heard in a while), they have descended from stale mediocrity to true suckitude. But who knows? Maybe they'll pull a Liz Phair and get a big radio hit and not have to worry about the opinions of snooty music critics anymore.

8.30.05
Okay, you want my theory on who shot Suge Knight this weekend in Miami? Well, too bad, because I don't have anything else to write about today. Plus, it's as good as anything the police are going to come up with, given that there are no eyewitnesses despite the fact that the shooting took place in a club in front of hundreds of people.

So who did it? Robert Van Winkle, aka Vanilla Ice, who lives in the Miami area and who has a beef with Knight: Van Winkle has claimed that Knight had a thug dangle him upside-down off a hotel balcony until he agreed to sign over the royalty rights for "Ice Ice Baby" to Knight.

I have absolutely no proof that this theory has any basis in fact. But wouldn't it be cool if it were true?

8.31.05
I didn't care much for Transatlanticism, and all the preemptive talk about Death Cab for Cutie selling out on their major label debut, Plans, had me leaning more towards not getting it immediately, but waiting a while to see what the overall response was. But I've been listening to the clips on iTunes, and I really like the feel of it——it seems much more intimate than the half-hearted attempts at stadium rock on Transatlanticism. In fact, it reminds me very much of The Photo Album, which is my favorite release of their to date. I'll still reserve judgment til I've heard it for real, but I guess I'll be picking it up this weekend after all.