notes - archives - november 2005

11.1.05
I have only been able to listen to the officially released version of Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine briefly. It just sounds too forced, too cute, too shallow compared to the much more nuanced and pensive production by Jon Brion on the unreleased version that made its way to the internet after Fiona decided to scrap it and start over.

Mercifully, she's left the title track intact——it does not seem to be noticeably different than the unreleased version, and it's one of the best songs she's ever done——but nothing else sounds quite as good as the tracks I downloaded last March (in fact, the closer the song is to Brion's version, teh higher in ranks in my book). I've done my duty——I've paid her for the songs——but that doesn't mean I have to listen to inferior versions of them.

11.2.05
Definitely like the new Death Cab for Cutie, Plans, better than their last record. I still don't like it as much as their earlier work, but at least now it's plausible to believe that they'll continue to produce worthwhile records despite the fact that they're signed to a major label that thinks it can break them to the top 40.

11.3.05
I don't know where Broken Social Scene comes up with their song titles, but "Handjobs for the Holidays" just kills me. I see in the liner notes for the song, which appears to be an in-studio to-do list of tasks required to get the song finished, that one of the items is "Get Canning to title more songs", presumably referring to founding member Brendan Canning. In case anyone in the band cares, I second that motion.

11.4.05
Meatwad is a better rapper than Master Shake. But then, Danger Doom didn't really give Shake a fair shot.

11.7.05

Mixtape: 1988

Track 1
"It's Only Life"
Only Life
The Feelies

The Feelies have a lot of interesting little factoids in their history——their name comes from a more immersive form of movies described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World; Golden Palominos prime mover Anton Fier was the drummer on their debut album; one of the members later went on to found Luna, etc.——but what they will be most remembered for is their uncanny ability to sound more like the Velvet Underground than even Lou Reed's most Velvet-y solo efforts.

And on none of their albums is this more true than Only Life, whose lead-off track, "It's Only Life", could be a leftover gem from the Velvets heyday. The Feelies even close the album by covering "What Goes On", which is both a homage to their most obvious primary source and a reminder that, at the end of the day, no one can ever really comes close to recreating the sound and the mystery of the Velvet Underground.

Still, the Feelies give it a pretty good shot on this record, and while most bands would aspire to something more than being remembered as the best band ever to ape the sound of a legendary predecessor like the Velvet Underground, I guess it's better to be remembered for that than nothing at all.

11.8.05
It is absolutely mind-boggling that "Karma Police" was such a huge hit for Radiohead, especially given that its popularity was in large part propelled by MTV. I'm not complaining——it was that song and "Paranoid Android" that first convinced me that Radiohead had grown into a band worth paying attention to (although my favorite song from OK Computer is still "Subterranean Homesick Alien")——it's just very odd that our pop culture would ever open its mind to such a song, even in the post-grunge mid-90s when the Eels were legitimate pop stars, however briefly, and Beck regularly ranked magazine covers.

11.9.05
The Raveonettes are one of those bands who you could take virtually any song from their first two releases, stick it on a mixtape, and have the recipient go, "Wow. Who the hell is that? Give me more." And then, after listening to a whole album's worth of the stuff, they'd say, "Okay. Maybe not so much at once. But keep putting them on my mixtapes."

That's pretty much my reaction whenever they pop up on the iPod's shuffle——I always love the track and convince myself to go back and listen to Whip It On or Chain Gang of Love in their entirety, and I always come away disappointed by that experience. If this band had released the songs on those records as a series of EPs with three or four songs apiece, they'd have been annointed as the new rock gods by the indie snobs at Pitchfork. But a litle bit goes a long way, and five songs in a row crosses some threshhold with the Raveonettes that makes it impossible to continue to enjoy their material without a cooling-off period.

11.10.05
Since the iPod has become the center of my musical universe, I have found myself compelled to try and rate every single song that I have loaded into iTunes. I would prefer a 10 point scale, but given that 5 is all I have to work with, here's how my basic classifications work:

1 star——This sucks. I never want to hear it again.

2 stars——Ugh. Also terrible. Also never want to hear it again. But it gets a little extra credit because it comes from an artist I like.

3 stars——Decent. I don't mind hearing this, but it's not a standout track.

4 stars——This song evokes an emotional response, and it's likely to be one of the handful of great tracks on the album it's from.

5 stars——No matter what kind of mood I'm in, I'll love hearing this song. I have probably loved this from the first time I heard it, and I expect I'll love it til the day I die. Certainly not all peppy songs in this category, but they're all songs that grab ahold of me. If I don't want to hear this multiple times each time it comes up on shuffle, it doesn't deserve five stars.

I have a playlist that has nothing but my 4 and 5 star tracks, but it is constantly shifting: if a song that I previously rated at this level plays and I even have a passing thought about hitting the skip button, it gets demoted to 3 stars.

11.11.05
Aside from the reduced quality of the music on the official version of Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine compared to the unreleased Jon Brion version, the track order really sucks.

11.21.05
I was in Chicago on business over the last week, so naturally the songs that ran through my head during my trip were related to the city, including the Hold Steady's "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night", Wilco's "Via Chicago", Sufjan Stevens' "Chicago", the Violent Femmes "To the Kill" ("That bitch took my money and she went to Chicago"), and Liz Phair's "Stratford-On-Guy" ("I was flying into Chicago at night/Watching the lake turn the sky into blue-green smoke").

Not a bad set of songs to have making laps in your brain for a week——good enough, in fact, to make me consider a Chicago-themed mixtape, but so far very few other candidates have presented themselves.

11.22.05
I rarely listen to music when I'm on vacation——just too much movement and activity for me to have many chances to reflect with my headphones on——so it's always stunning to hear music again after not really listening to any for a few days. On the plane on the way back from Chicago, I turned on my iPod for the first time since getting off the plane a week before, and the song that the iPod shuffled into the first slot was, fittingly, Sufjan Stevens' "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" from his Illinois album. It's a sprawling work with at least four distinctive movements, and listening to it as we crossed Lake Michigan heading away from Chicago, it really got to me. It's nice to be reminded every now and then of just how powerful songs can be; when you're constantly surrounded by them, it's easy to forget just how lucky we are to have access to vast libraries of music for almost any taste or mood.

11.23.05
I can't remember the last time I bought a new CD. The big holiday sales focus of the fourth quarter always sucks.

11.28.05
Well, thanks to a trip to the record store to buy my sister some long-overdue birthday presents and an unexpected sale at said record store (buy one used, get one free, and 20% off most other stuff), I have finally broken my streak of weeks without buying a CD in a big way. For my sister I got Wilco's A Ghost Is Born (used), the New Pornographers' Twin Cinema, Bright Eyes' I'm Wide Awake It's Morning, Architecture in Helsinki's In Case We Die, and the Shout Out Louds' Howl Howl Gaff Gaff. For myself, I got Kanye West's Late Registration (used), the Fiery Furnaces' Rehearsing My Choir, Wilco's new live double set Kicking Television, Ben Folds' Rockin' the Suburbs (used), Deerhoof's The Runners Four, Ted Leo's The Tyranny of Distance, Rancid's And Out Come the Wolves (used), Grandaddy's Excerpts from the Diary of Todd Zilla, and Rogue Wave's Descended Like Vultures.

That's a lot of music, I know, but as I've mentioned, I haven't really bought anything in almost two months, and it's likely to be another couple of months before anything new that I want is released. Plus, thanks to the sale, I ended up only paying about $10 per CD, even though only four of them were used. A few of these were discs I've been looking for for a while but which they've never had in stock (Ted Leo, Grandaddy), a few were discs I've just been putting off buying (Rogue Wave, Fiery Furnaces), and a few were discs that I might not have bought if not for the sale (Ben Folds, Rancid). Overall I'm pretty pleased with my pickups; I just hope they're enough to keep me entertained through the no-release period leading up to the holidays.

11.29.05
I've been trying to listen to the new Fiery Furnaces, Rehearsing My Choir, which has a lot of spoken-word narration by the siblings' grandmother. It's gotten mixed reviews, and I as a diehard Furnaces fan, I was pretty concerned about how this odd little experiment would turn out (which is why I've delayed purchasing it for so long). So far it's not as bad as my worst imaginings of it, but it also hasn't caught fire with me yet. But it took a while before the brilliant Blueberry Boat gripped me, too, so I'm going to continue to give Choir some more time to fully win me over.

11.30.05
I have to say, out of all the stuff I purchased recently, I'm enjoying Grandaddy's oddly titled Excerpts from the Diary of Todd Zilla the most. The band sounds far more relaxed than they usually do on their full-length releases, and it really suits them well.