notes - archives - october 2005

10.3.05
New purchases: Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary, Mazarin's We're Already There, the Iron and Wine/Calexico collaboration In the Reins, Super Furry Animals' Love Kraft, and Ryan Adams and the Cardinals' Jacksonville City Nights. Wolf Parade is excellent, Iron and Wine is great as usual, the rest are pretty good on first listen.

10.4.05
My favorite song so far on the new Wolf Parade is the first track, "You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son". These lines especially get me:

I will draw three figures on your heart
One of them will be me as a boy
One of them will be me
One of them will be me watching you run

Very rarely does a song with such a great title live up to its promise lyrically, but I think they nailed this one.

10.5.05
We went to see the Decemberists for the third time in the last 12 months on Saturady night (fourth if you count the Colin Meloy solo show in DC), and I have to say, the band seems like it's getting tired of being on the road. This was easily their worst show that we've seen, and the fact that we've been able to see them in the Baltimore/DC area so often in the past year should tell you a lot about just how much they've been on the road. There was very little of the banter that the band is known for, they played a short, unispired set, and finished with an encore of only one song, which is unprecedented——they usually play at least four songs, and sometimes do more than one encore. Add to this the fact that the sound system was crappy and they did something to Meloy's acoustic guitar to make it sound processed and completely devoid of intimacy and emotion, and it was a thoroughly disappointing show. And they still didn't play The Tain, which as this point is the only reason I keep going to see them live.

There was one funny moment about three songs in——Colin was complaining about the lighting on the stage, and said something like "Why is it so dark up here? We're not Bauhaus for god's sake." The band then spontaneously broke into a minute-long rendition of "Bela Lugosi Is Dead", the humor of which I'm afraid was lost on much of their audience, who have been turning more and more from seemingly intelligent and extremely appreciative music fans to fratboys and club girls who like to sing along to every freaking song——that is, when they're not busy with their cell phones.

I guess I'm glad that the band is doing so well, but I tell you, it's going to take a lot to convince me to go see another show if the atmosphere and ther performance are going to be like this one——it's just not worth it if that's what I can expect from here on out.

10.6.05
I'm going to buy the new Fiona Apple record, Extraordinary Machine, even though I already have the Jon Brion-produced version that made its way around the internet earlier this year. Actually, I'm buying it because I downloaded the internet version——I want to pay for my content from artists. From what I've heard so far, I don't expect the revamped version to be as good as the version I already have, but that's not surprsing since I'm severely biased towards Jon Brion, one of my favorite producers. At least they left the title track alone, which just might be the best song released this year. Although it is an odd choice to have it lead off the album——it's much better suited to closing our a record than kicking one off.

10.10.05
Wolf Parade continue to impress, dominating my playlist. Sure, I still try to let the other new releases have their turn, and even though a few of them are quite decent, I'm always secretly pining for them to finish so we can get back to Apologies for the Queen Mary. I think the Hold Steady still win for album of the year, because Separation Sunday is one of those career-defining moments that's either going to be the best thing they ever do or the start to a series of three or four albums of genius that will make them into rock heroes for generations to come. Wolf Parade may well be starting such a series themselves, but they've got no mythic history to add to their appeal and they've got all the time in the world to have their moment in the spotlight.

10.11.05
For the last couple of weeks I've been toying with the idea of combing through the Ryan Adams releases that I've bought over the past couple of years (pretty much all of them except for Demolition and Rock N Roll) to find the album or two worth of good songs that are buried among the flood of releases. But it's a mind-numbingly dull task, because there are so many half-hearted efforts or just plain duds; every record he's released after his sophomore record, Gold, is more like a b-sides collection than a real album, in that there are lots of throwaways, a few gems, and a few fun but pointless tracks.

Going back to Heartbreaker (his debut) and Gold is a revelation——you find yourself amazed that he can string together that many good songs in a row given his recent scattershot efforts. Cold Roses is probably his only release from the last three years that comes anywhere close to being as coherent and solid as his first two records, and as a double album, even that record could use some serious cutting. It's worth noting that Gold was orginally planned as a double album, but his record company somehow convinced him to trim it back to a single release, something that would not have hurt Cold Roses one bit. And while we're on the subject, even the officially released version Gold could have been a little less bloated.

Ryan, I've said it before and I'll say it again: You don't have to write every song that pops into your head. You don't have to record every song you write. And you don't have to release every song you record.

10.12.05
That's it. I'm finally done. On to 1988.

10.12.05

Mixtape: 1987

Track 21
"Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want"
Louder Than Bombs
The Smiths

This track is hard to place chronologically: It was originally included on Hatful of Hollow, a collection of b-sides, singles, and Peel Session tracks released in England in 1984. That record was never formally released in the US, although by the time I became a Smiths fan in 1986, it was pretty easy to get as an import. "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" was, in fact, the first song I ever heard by the Smiths by way of the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, which I bought because it had tracks from INXS and Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark (this record also had tracks from Echo & the Bunnymen and New Order, and it essentially served as my initiation into the world of college rock). The song's first relase on a Smiths album in the US was on Louder Than Bombs, which contained six new songs and a whole wagonload of tracks that were previously unreleased stateside, including much of the material that had been compiled on Hatful of Hollow. Together with Strangeways, Here We Come, from which I've already pulled a song for this mixtape, Louder Than Bombs was part of a wealth of material that the band released in 1987.

Unfortunately, this would also be the last material they would ever release, aside from a medicore live album that was clearly aimed at picking up a few more dollars from the newly swelling ranks of Smiths fans who had nothing new to purchase. Sure, it wasn't too long before Morrissey was cranking out solo albums, and Johnny Marr would go on to pop up on records with Electronic, The The, and Billy Bragg, but everyone knew from the second they heard about the band's breakup that no one from the Smiths would ever go on to do anything as remotely good as the Smiths.

Snide hipsters like to see "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" as some sort of ironic take on teen longing, but you know, Morrissey could actually be quite sincere when he wanted to be, and I don't think he's being anything but genuine on this little gem. I think you could have made a fine 1987 mixtape using nothing but selections from the copious amount of material released by the Smiths this year, but in this format, the most I could justify working in was two, one from each of the major releases. Savor them now, because the band tragically won't be appearing on any future year mixtapes (although Morrissey will certainly get his due, at least for his first couple of solo releases).

10.13.05
The new version of iTunes, version 6, which was released primarily so you could download tv shows and music videos and watch them on your computer or on your spiffy new video iPod, also includes a new recommendation section. It still has the beta tag on it, and good thing, too——it kept recommending the same albums to me over and over, even after I'd told it that I already owned them or I didn't like them.

10.14.05
I really want to buy the new Strokes single, "Juicebox", from iTunes, but the original description listed it not as an exclusive track, but as an "album preview" (they've since changed it to plain old "single). What this means to me is that I'm going to end up purchasing this on the actual CD later, but by offering it to me in advance, they're hoping that I'm going to pay for it twice just so I can listen to it a couple of months early. It would be one thing if it were bundled with an exclusive b-side or something like that (I mean, isn't this kind of why b-sides were invented?), but I can't bring myself to pay an extra dollar for a track I know I'm going to purchase again in January on the full album.

10.17.05
Today is the second anniversary of this site, and while I didn't keep my promise to be well into the 1988 mixtape by now, I can at least offer you the tracklist, which came together surprising quickly given my initial doubts about the breadth of quality material I had to pull from. I still have to write the intro and the commentary on the individual songs, but that effort is already underway and I hope it won't be too long before we're looking at 1989.

Anyway, here's the tracklist:

"It's Only Life"
Only Life
The Feelies
"Chinese Bones"
Globe of Frogs
Robyn Hitchcock
"Bottle of Smoke"
If I Should Fall From Grace With God
The Pogues
"Juno"
House Tornado
Throwing Muses
"Birthday"
Life's Too Good
The Sugarcubes
"Wish I Could Stand or Have"
Two Steps From the Middle Ages
Game Theory
"Everyday Is Like Sunday"
Viva Hate
Morrissey
"One of These Days"
Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart
Camper Van Beethoven
"Storms in Africa"
Watermark
Enya
"Misguided Angel"
The Trinity Session
Cowboy Junkies
"Venice"
Themes From Venus
Love Tractor
"Out of Reach"
Lovely
The Primitives
"Standing in the Shower...Thinking"
Nothing's Shocking
Jane's Addiction
"Ghetto Soundwave"
Truth and Soul
Fishbone
"Gigantic"
Surfer Rosa
The Pixies
"Silver Rocket"
Daydream Nation
Sonic Youth
"Anchorage"
Short Sharp Shocked
Michelle Shocked
"I'll Treat You Right Someday"
Monkey on a Chain Gang
House of Freaks
"Chains"
Clam Dip and Other Delights
Soul Asylum
"If I Was a Mekon"
Son of Sam I Am
Too Much Joy
"Green Thoughts"
Green Thoughts
The Smithereens
"A New Season"
Starfish
The Church
"Untitled"
Green
R.E.M.

10.18.05

Mixtape: 1988

When I first started combing through the releases for 1988, I have to admit I was disappointed——there were so many mediocre releases from bands whose previous records I had loved with a passon, including the Balancing Act, Siouxsie and the Banshees, That Petrol Emotion, Wire, Let's Active, Julian Cope, the Woodentops, Scruffy the Cat, Waxing Poetics, Timbuk 3, EIEIO, and the Violent Femmes (most of whom you've seen on one of the two previous year mixtapes). Some of these would go on to have solid comebacks in the future, most notably Julian Cope and That Petrol Emotion, but many of these groups permanently put their best days behind them with these releases, and for more than a few, these would actually be the last records they ever released (Let's Active, the Woodentops, and Scruffy the Cat, to name the three biggest losses).

On the other hand, we had a passel of solid releases from established bands like the Smithereens, Game Theory, the Church, Soul Asylum, and Love Tractor, along with several groups who were making what would turn out to be their masterpieces (Robyn Hitchcock, Throwing Muses, Camper Van Beethoven, the Pogues, Fishbone, and Sonic Youth). In addition, we saw debuts from a few bands who would go on to bigger and better things, although some of their first tries are pretty impressive (Jane's Addiction, House of Freaks, Cowboy Junkies, and the Sugarcubes).

Even given the quality releases I found when I dug deeper into my collection, I was still worried about having enough material to fill out a whole mixtape and not sure how I would put all the pieces together. But this mixtape actually came together surprisingly fast——with the two previous mixes, I had at least four drafts before I hit on the right combination of artists and songs, and they each took me a couple of weeks to put together. With the 1988 mixtape, I hit upon the final tracklisting on my second try, and it only took me one evening. And despite all the should-have-beens that weren't quite up to snuff, there were still plenty of great records to pull from; in some ways, this is the most listenable of the three year mixtapes I've compiled so far.

10.19.05
I am finally coming around to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. At first my expectations were set too high because of the mountains of critical praise that were being heaped on them; this, combined with my relatively lengthy search for the disc before resorting to ordering it online, served to make a disappointment almost inevitable. But I absorbed it for a week, ignored it for a couple of weeks after that, and have recently been able to come back to it relatively fresh, with no elevated expectations. And so of course now it exceeds them.

If my path to the Clap Your Hands record had been the same as, say, the way I discoverd the Shout Out Louds' Howl Howl Gaff Gaff, it would probably have remained in my daily playlist from the second I heard it. With Howl Howl, someone recommended it to me via email, and then by chance the next time I was in a record store they were playing it over the store speakers, so I bought it and quickly came to love its small charms and quirks. Now that each of these albums have been in my bloodstream for a bit, I can recommend them both, but I would recommend the Clap Your Hands more strongly.

10.20.05
There's a ton of new stuff I want to buy——Animal Collective, Danger Doom, Franz Ferdinand, Deerhoof, Fiona Apple, My Morning Jacket, Arab Strap, Broken Social Scene——but I just haven't had time to get to the record store recently, and with a new Fiery Furnaces due out next week, I've got a good excuse to put off my purchases for a few more days. It probably doesn't hurt that Wolf Parade and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have been in heavy rotation recently, either.

10.21.05
I worked at home yesterday, building out the virtual tour portion of my office's new web site, and I alternated between listening to Death From Above 1979's You're a Woman, I'm a Machine and Belle & Sebastian's Push Barman to Open Old Wounds compilation. Weird combo, but it worked for me.

10.24.05
So I made it out to the record store after all this weekend and managed to pick up most of the stuff on my list: Animal Collective's Feels, Broken Social Scene's self-titled third disc, Danger Doom's The Mouse and the Mask, My Morning Jacket's Z, Franz Ferdinand's You Could Have It So Much Better, and the officially released version of Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine. I also picked up Kanye West's College Dropout because that "Jesus Walks" song has been stuck in my head for about two weeks; I was initially going to get a used copy, but then I noticed they had new copies cheaper than the used copies (how that could happen I have no idea), so I got me a new one instead.

The only thing I didn't find was a copy of Arab Strap's latest, The Last Romance. Turns out that's because it doesn't have a US distributor yet, and since I'm not willing to wait an indeterminate number of months for it to show up on our shores, I'm now trying to figure out whether it will be cheaper for me to order it on Amazon UK or whether I should use one of the US online services that specialize in imports. But either way I should have it before too long, and I've got plenty to keep me occupied in the meantime (plus we've got the Fiery Furnaces and Rogue Wave due out this week).

10.25.05
As an Adult Swim fan, I find the voices of Adult Swim characters on the Danger Mouse/MF Doom collaboration Danger Doom to be one of the cooler pop culture crossovers in recent memory, but I can't imagine what people who have never watched Sealab 2021 or Aqua Teen Hunger Force must think of it all.

10.26.05
Am I wrong, or is My Morning Jacket basically a Kentucky-fried version of Broken Social Scene? I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but that comparison hit me within two bars of the first My Morning Jacket song I listened to, and I haven't heard anything since that makes me want reconsider the idea.

10.27.05
The iPod is fucking with me again. Today I was listening to a playlist that included a lot of the albums I've purchased in the last few weeks, including My Morning Jacket and Kanye West. There were twice as many Kanye tracks as My Morning Jacket (20 to 10), and I was really, really in the mood to hear Kanye.

But what did the iPod give me? Out of the first 40 songs, I got 6 tracks by My Morning Jacket, easily the highest count from any single artist in the playlist, and none from Kanye. I finally got fed up and switched to just Kanye for 5 or 6 songs, just so I could get my fix. Then I switched back to a random shuffle of the previous playlist.

And what did the iPod give me then? 3 Kanye songs in a row (and no, I hadn't forgotten to switch back to the larger playlist——the next song was non-Kanye). Cute, iPod. Very cute.

10.28.05
I generally like the New Pornographers, but sometimes their songs are a little too perfect, you know? Anything that clean makes me suspicious.

10.31.05
Haven't bought anything on iTunes in a while, but over the weekend I bought Spoon's exclusive track, "My First Time, Vol. 3", after I convinced myself that I wasn't going to repurchase it on an album later. It's different from anything on their most recent record, Gimme Fiction, and actually sounds a lot more what I would have expected the follow-up to Kill the Moonlight to sound like. Definitely a worthwhile purchase if you're a Spoon fan.