notes - archives - december 2005

12.1.05
My most recent iTunes purchase is the Arcade Fire/David Bowie Live EP from the Fashion Rocks show, which I bought despite warnings of the bad mix by many of the reviewers. They weren't wrong——the sound is pretty crappy in a lot of places——but they're still worth owning. Makes you wish that they would have spent a little more time setting up the mixing board, though, especially if they knew ahead of time that they might be asking people to pay for recordings of the performance.

12.2.05
The first time I listened to Kanye West's Late Registration, my immediate impression was that it was nowhere as good as College Dropout. But now I can't figure out why I thought that.

12.5.05
The new Wilco live album, Kicking Television, is a bit of a mixed bag. On some of the tracks, they've really captured the intensity of their recent live performances (I've seen them twice in the last year or so and was blown away each time), but others are typical live album dross. The setlist is pretty reflective of the stuff I saw them play——lots of stuff from A Ghost Is Born and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, with a few choice nuggets from Being There and Summer Teeth and a couple of covers thrown in for good measure.

It's worth getting if you're a Wilco fan, whether or not you've managed to catch them live since the release of A Ghost Is Born, and I'd say it's better than the average live album. For some bands, this would actually be an exceptional live release, but for Wilco, who are at the height of their powers when performing in front of an audience, a live album is really just a dim reflection of what it's really like to see them in person.

12.6.05
The Fiery Furnaces' latest, an oddball collaboration with their grandmother titled Rehearsing My Choir, sounds like something that one of the artists at the American Visionary Art Museum would have recorded as a companion piece to one of their visual projects. But I guess that doesn't do you much good if you've never been to the Visionary Musuem before.

12.7.05
Two CDs that I have wanted to purchase for a while now but which I have been unable to bring myself to buy in a public setting like an indie record store: Abba's greatest hits CD, Gold, which I really only started pining after in the last few years, and Duran Duran's Rio, the last great album they would ever record and probably their best all-around effort. The part of me that doesn't want to admit to any lapses in taste or duds in the stuff-I-really-like section of my music collection is appalled by my desire for these two discs, but the part of me that can be honest with myself really, really wants them.

Don't judge me.

12.8.05
I'm going to see the Pogues, bitches! The real Pogues, too, the Pogues with Shane McGowan at the helm (provided, of course, that they don't suffer some sort of alcohol- and ego-fueled meltdown on tour before they get to the date I have tickets for). This the first time Shane has played with the rest of the Pogues stateside in about a decade, and my first opportunity to see them live ever.

Even better: I will be attending the concert with a longtime friend and the author of the Sliced Tongue music blog, who has recently written a series on the Pogues' catalog that's better than anything I've written here in a long time (I can't find a way to link the whole series at once, so here are the individual entries: entry 1, entry 2, entry 3, entry 4, entry 5, entry 6, entry 7, entry 8). It will also likely be the first time I've seen him in person in several years, despite the fact that he moved back within an hour and a half of where I live a couple of years ago. So let's just hope the band, and more specifically Shane, holds together long enough to make that show.

12.9.05
One of the CDs that I got as part of the bargain night when I bought my sister her birthday CDs was Rancid's Out Come the Wolves. I haven't thought about Rancid in years, I didn't really listen to them when they were popular back in the mid-90s, and to be honest, I probably wouldn't have bought this album used even if it had only been $5. But when I was digging around the used bin looking for a final CD so I could take advantage of the 2-1 used sale, I spotted Wolves, remembered liking "Ruby Soho", and figured I'd take a chance on it since it was essentially free.

Listening to it now, I'm not sure why this record didn't appeal to me back then, other than that Rancid may have been one of those bands that I resented because they had a fairly easy ride in the wake of Nirvana's success, when the major labels signed anyone who knew how to play a guitar very loudly. I liked Wolves from the first note, and there weren't any songs that I wanted to skip (it would have hardly been worth the effort anyway——no track cracks the 3 1/2 minute mark, and most of them are 2 1/2 minutes or less).

The Clash comparisons the band has had to answer to throughout their career are apt (there's also a good bit of Social Distortion in there too), but not worth worrying about. The same way that I don't care that Interpol is borrowing from Joy Division, the Feelies ripped off the Velvet Underground, or the Raveonettes are mimicing early Jesus and Mary Chain, I don't care that Rancid is nicking from the Clash. At the end of the day, this is a damn good album, and that's all you really need to say about it.

12.12.05
I've decided that the Fiery Furnaces' Rehearsing My Choir is more annoying than interesting. As an art experiment, it's got some merit, but as music...not so much.

12.13.05
I don't want to write this paper. I've been dreading it for weeks, and the only music that properly matches my dark mood now that I can't put it off any longer is Death From Above 1979's You're a Woman, I'm a Machine. Welcome to heavy rotation, my friend. I've got hours of work to do and no desire whatsoever to do it.

12.14.05
It turns out that Broken Social Scene's self-titled latest disc is an excellent companion when you're paper-writing. And since that's where all of my writing energy has gone over the past 24 hours, that's all you get from me today.

12.15.05
From Robyn Hitchock's "Sinister but She Was Happy":

She was sinister but she was happy
With a cheery smile and poison blowpipe
Sinister but she was happy
Like a kind of spider half-inclined to free you

Hitchcock is known primarily for his loopy-but-somehow-true non-sequitor couplets, but hearing this song again for the first time in a couple of years reminded me that his lyrics are all does-that-really-mean-anything trickery (although I'm quite fond of that trickery personally). He was fully capable of writing a wickedly clever straight lyric when he set his mind to it.

12.16.05
I downloaded the new Belle & Sebastian live album yesterday, which is a live version of If You're Feeling Sinister performed in its entirety. The sound quality is a amazing, the best I've heard on a live record in a while, and it seems to be a fairly accurate recreation of a Belle & Sebastian concert according to the reviewers who claim to have actually seen the band perform. You shouldn't need any more motivation to purchase this if you're a fan, but just in case: the proceeds go to charity.

12.19.05
When I first heard the Eels' Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, I recognized that it was a nice return to form after a couple of dodgy, unfocused albums, but I didn't think it had a chance of making my top 10 for 2005. But man, it's got a lot of good songs on it, many of which have been showing up frequently in my iPod's not-so-random shuffle playlist, and it's quickly becoming a darkhorse contender.

12.20.05
Let's be honest: with bands like Broken Social Scene, Wolf Parade, The Arcade Fire, and Death From Above 1979 (to name just a few) on its side, Canadian indie is kicking American indie's ass.

12.21.05
I've never even considered doing an end-of-year best singles list, but once again, the iPod is responsible for so drastically altering my listening habits that it seems ridiculous not to do one this year. So I'm working on my top 10 singles in addition to my 10 favorite albums from 2005. Wolf Parade will absolutely have a song in that list, but it's tearing me apart to have to choose between "You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son" and "I'll Believe in Anything".

12.22.05
Deerhoof seem like one of those bands that I should just be head over heels in love with, but I'm not——at least not yet. There are several of their songs that I can't get enough of, but just enough clunkers on each record from thinking they're one of the best bands working today. This is similar to the way I feel about Yo La Tengo: when I like their stuff, I really, really like it, but that happens at most with about 60% of their songs, and the remaining songs are middling to poor. It doesn't get much better than "Flower", though.

12.23.05
My playlist of highly rated songs from the past 15 years was playing too many instrumentals and not shuffling the artists enough, so I decided to switch to my playlist of highly rated songs from 1990 and earlier. The result: songs 1 and 3 were Prince songs from Purple Rain, and song 2 was a Camper Van Beethoven instrumental from Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. Cute, iPod. Can't you use your psychic powers for good for once, instead of to play these games with me?