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march 2006
3.2.06
Man, the iPod had a serious jones for Eels when we were traveling this week. Must be dropping a hint that it would like me to pick up the new live album, Live at Town Hall: Eels with Strings. I'm on it... |
3.3.06
I've had no space for new CDs for quite some time——my two bookshelves reserved for CDs have long-since been filled——but the problem is getting pretty critical now. Not only are my obsessive-compulsive impulses offended at not having my entire CD collection in alphabetical-chronological order, but most of the few empty spaces in my study are now taken up with stacks of unfiled CDs 15-20 discs high. Something must be done... |
3.6.06
Caught Belle and Sebastian down in DC last night, with openers the New Pornographers. My wife and I met my buddy Sliced Tongue for the show, which is the first time I've seen him in person in five years or so, even though he moved back to this area a couple of years ago and we stay in touch via email and our blogs.
It was a pretty good show, but I'm too wiped to write much about it now, so more details tomorrow. In the meantime, if you'd like a taste of what we experienced, the same two bands are playing the same venue tonight, and NPR is going to broadcast it live. Go here for more details.
P.S.——I never do titles for my posts, because I'm just not clever enough, but if I did, I'd have the perfect one for today: "We Are the Sleepyheads". |
3.7.06
Okay, so I'm not going to write about the show today. But I'll do it soon, before I forget the details. In the meantime, I'll just post a quick note about my last trip to the record store, where I picked up the Arctic Monkeys Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, Arab Strap's The Last Romance, and the Minus 5's latest, self-titled record (often referred to as The Gun Album because of the pistol on the cover).
All of them are pretty good, but of course I've been spending the most time with the Monkeys because of my recent obsession with their EPs. The album's not quite as good as I had hoped, but it's still pretty good despite an inexplicable re-recording of "Fake Tales of San Francisco", the album version of which is noticeably less powerful than the version released on the Five Minutes with Arctic Monkeys two-song download-only single released last year. |
3.8.06
Argh. No time to write a recap of the Belle and Sebastian show today. iTunes, why can't you be nice and give me a new single to download and write about instead? Now people are stuck reading this, which has to do with music in only the most tangential way... |
3.9.06
"There Is No Ending", from Arab Strap's latest record, The Last Romance, is one of my favorite Arab Strap songs ever. But why, dear god why, did they have to put over a minute of blank space at the end of the song before the next track starts? That kind of crap has always been irritating, but it's even more annoying in the digital age when you can't use the song in a mix without first taking it into an editor and chopping out the wasted space. Grrrr... |
3.10.06
So. The New Pornographers/Belle and Sebastian show was pretty good. As I've mentioned before, I'm a fan of the New Pornographers, but I find it hard to listen to them in large doses, just because the songs are so consistently good——which is a little hard to understand, I admit. Let me put it this way: listening to their records is like listening to a greatest hits record, and I'm just not the kind of guy who likes listening to greatest hits records.
Their show was pretty good, though——they were nice and relaxed (read: drunk off their asses), and they were pretty interactive with the crowd. The poor keyboardist, who was also covering the vocal parts that are sung on the record by Neko Case, had some sort of flu thing, and her voice gradually disintegrated to the point where she wasn't able to sing at all for the second show the next night. They didn't reveal too much new about the songs during the live performances, but they did seem livelier than the album versions, which of course have made their way back onto my current playlist since seeing them live.
Belle and Sebastian were pretty relaxed, too, and frontman Stuart Murdoch spent a lot of time chatting with the crowd in between songs (at least partially because, with the numerous instrument changes, the band usually needed some time to get set up——the drummer was the only band member who didn't change his instrument or his position on stage during the show). The set was heavy on tracks from the new record and from the Push Barman to Open Old Wounds compilation, which contains older material but which was also released as a set in the last year. I was really hoping to hear "String Bean Jean", "Photo Jenny", and "Piazza, New York Catcher", but it was not to be——they did play "String Bean Jean", but not the other two.
Overall it was a pretty good show, and as an added bonus, we pretty much got to see it for free——I bought two extra tickets and sold them on eBay two weeks before the show, and the profit on that was enough to cover the costs of my wife's ticket, Sliced Tongue's ticket, and my ticket.
Weird show factoid: the lead singers for both bands used the word "colloquialism" in their banter with the crowd.
On to the Pogues... |
3.13.06
Ah, the Pogues. What a great fucking show. I know that with a band who haven't released any new material or seen our shores for so long that they've essentially become legends from our younger years, there is a strong temptation to give them extra credit and gloss over some of the faults in the live performance, but it really was an amazing show. The band was full of energy and as tight musically as you could hope, and even Shane did a pretty good job with the lyrics, especially for someone who was known back in the band's heyday for being so drunk at shows he had to read his lyrics from scraps of paper in order to remember them all. No crib notes for him at this show, and there was only one song ("White City") where he really seemed to give up on singing to the point where the band had to cut the song short.
The rest of the band didn't look too bad——older, of course, but still reasonably fit looking——but Shane is really looking terrible, and this is a guy who people thought was teetering on the edge of death 15 years ago. The band had to let him take frequent breaks to make it through the show——every third or fourth song, Shane would wander offstage and another band member would take their turn at the microphone. Shane was drinking whiskey straight from the bottle, but it was a mostly half-hearted effort——he really drank maybe four or five swigs, and then ended up spilling the rest of it all over the himself and the stage by the end of the show. That's not to say he was steady onstage by any means——whether it was age or alcohol, his walk could be charitably described as a stumble, and when he said anything in-between songs, it was completely slurred and unintelligible. Despite this, his singing was pretty good. Except for his previously mentioned abandonment of "White City" mid-song, I don't there was another notable miscue——it was actually a better performance than I think I would have expected (or gotten) from him back when the band was still an active touring unit.
The setlist was great, too——the band played a nice mix of stuff from all the real Pogues records (the rest of the band went on to record two more studio records after Shane left the band), and they stuck to the favorites. "Bottle of Smoke" was the track I most wanted to hear, and I got my wish, and I'm betting that most people who were holding out for a particular song got their wishes as well. The encore featured a stirring version of their best known song, "Fairytale of New York", with Jem Finer's daughter replacing the late Kirsty MacColl on the female vocal part. Near the end of the song, fake snow started falling above the stage, which could have come off as really hokey, but which instead came off as touching and beautiful. Seriously.
What's a real shame about this mini-tour (only 8 dates in DC, Atlantic City, Boston, and NYC) is the mini part: these songs deserve to be heard live, and the band is certainly still capable of making them roar just as fiercely as they did 20 years ago, but even if Shane continues his remarkable defiance of the laws of nature, it's clear that he couldn't sustain a major, extended tour that would give all their fans a chance to see them. Based on how fast the tickets for these shows sold out, I think they could sell out much larger venues across the country. (I bought four tickets to this show less than a minute after they went on sale, and the show sold out within 10 minutes. A week before the show, I sold my extra ticket on eBay for five times the face value, which not only paid for the other three tickets, but made me a nice profit as well).
I'm not really a big fan of merch at shows usually, but I figured this really was a once-in-a-lifetime show, and I wanted some sort of tangible souvenir. I settled on two beer glasses with the Pogues logo, and a Pogues keychain bottle opener. I'm not a big drinker, but I can tell you what I'll be drinking my beer out of from now on. |
3.14.06
Despite my recent renewed appreciation for Canada's indie pop supergroup the New Pornographers after seeing them open for Belle and Sebastian last week, I'm still much more impressed with the recent work of their American counterparts, indie pop supergroup the Minus 5. Both bands traffic in classic pop themes, but despite (or perhaps because of?) the Minus 5's much more overt references to the Beatles, their new self-titled record (also known as The Gun Album) has clicked with me in a much more intense way than the Pornographers' most recent release, last year's Twin Cinema. Colin Meloy's vocals on one track also give the Minus 5 a big leg up——I'm much more taken with him than occasional New Pornographers siren Neko Case. |
3.15.06
I'm taking another physics class this semester, and I can't get this line from Robyn Hitchcock out of my head:
The universe is based on sullen entropy
I don't think it's possible to get more succinct or accurate than that.
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3.16.06
Early last year, my wife and I attended a solo acoustic show by Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy at a little coffee house down in DC. One of the very few items available for purchase at the merch booth was a self-recorded CD of Colin singing Morrissey covers, titled, appropriately enough, Colin Meloy Sings Morrissey. It was a pretty lo-fi recording, but since it was only meant for the hardcore fans, and there's a fairly strong correspondence between hardcore Decemberists fans and hardcore Smiths/Morrissey fans, it didn't need to be perfectly recorded or performed——I'm sure that everyone else that bought it treasured it just as much as I did, despite its flaws.
Colin went on another solo jaunt a couple of months ago after winding up an extensive and exhausting tour with the Decemberists after the release of last year's Picaresque. Even though he once again made a stop in our area, we weren't able to attend, so we missed out on the second EP in what seems to be turning into a series, a collection of Shirley Collins tunes called Colin Meloy Sings trad. arr. Shirley Collins, which I take to mean traditional songs arranged by Shirley Collins (which I guess means Colin's really singing covers of covers). So for my wife's birthday last month (she's a huge Decemberists fan), I scoured eBay for a copy, eventually picking one up for around $30, or three times what Colin sold them for on the tour. I suppose I should count myself lucky, though——while searching for copies of the disc on the auction site, I noticed that last year's disc of Morrissey covers is now selling for at least $150 per CD.
While still obviously a home recording, this disc is much more cleanly produced that it's predecessor, and Colin takes the time to use all four (or eight) tracks by adding in backing vocals and extra instrumetation on several songs. As opposed to last year's featured artist, I have absolutely zero clue who Shirley Collins is, but the songs are pretty good (and I realize that she didn't write them, but whatever).
In terms of the obsessive fan convergence factor, the Morrissey disc stands head and shoulders above the Shirley Collins, but the production on the latter disc is much better, and the songs are probably stronger on the whole than the songs that Colin covered from Morrissey (he purposely stuck to Morrissey b-sides, although to serious Morrissey fans, there's really no such thing as a b-side). Definitely worth the $30, especially because I couldn't have gotten a better gift for my wife unless we had actually been able to attend the show and buy it in person. |
3.17.06
St. Patrick's Day + Friday + sold out Pogues show + New York City = big trouble. I hope the venue hired some extra security for tonight... |
3.20.06
I just noticed that in the info window for songs in iTunes, there's a tab for lyrics, but all of the songs in my library are coming up blank, meaning (I guess) that Apple isn't storing that information on the servers that identify the CD and fill in other information like artist, year, title, etc. But I'm assuming they could, and if they could, why aren't they?
It's obvious stuff like this that's still missing from iTunes after all this time that just makes me scratch my head and wonder what Apple is thinking. |
3.21.06
I was kinda hoping that the Arctic Monkeys record would be this year's version of Separation Sunday (by the Hold Steady). But it's not. Not even close. Not to say the Monkeys aren't fun to listen to, but their debut just doesn't grab me like Separation Sunday did. That was the first great record of 2005, and it was almost the best. So far, there are a couple of contenders for the lower part of this year's top 10, but nothing that's got the clear edge to be at the top. |
3.22.06
Last night I attended my third concert at the 9:30 Club in DC in less than three weeks, again with my friend Sliced Tongue. The band was Stereolab, who I'm only a moderate fan of——I only own two of their records, Dots and Loops and Margarine Eclipse, and have never had a strong desire to own more. Sliced Tongue, however, is a big fan, a completist fan——he even bought the tour-only vinyl single depsite the fact that he no longer owns a record player (although to be fair, he does have a DJ friend who is going to digitize it for him).
I didn't really know what to expect from this show. I would describe Stereolab's music as arty French space rock——the kind of music that would be popular if Stanley Kubrick's sterilized vision of space travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey had come to pass. It's cool, detached, and abnormally pristine, which are not normally adjectives I would use to describe music that I like, and it was hard to picture it being performed live without imagining robots on stage playing the instruments in place of the human band members.
But the show wasn't anything like that: from the second the band took the stage, the club was throbbing with the raw pulse and energy that only comes from live rock. They didn't forgo any of their more nuanced touches, like live horns and multiple keyboard parts, but the bass and drums took center stage, and the guitars were certainly more prominent and aggressive than they are in the recorded versions of the songs. It was just so much more muscular——there was a rude animal strength to the songs that I don't hear when I listen to their CDs. If they could find a way to pack the emotion and rawness of their live performance into their studio recordings, I would almost certainly own more of their catalogue.
It was a fantastic show, and even if I don't get converted to a true believer as a result of seeing them live (I'm going to go back and listen to the discs that I already own to make sure I haven't been missing something in them that will reveal itself more clearly now that I've heard the songs performed in concert), I'd definitely be willing to see them again on their next tour——you don't have to be a huge fan to enjoy a great performance. |
3.23.06
The Decemberists have more songs (seven) in my top 50 most played songs smart playlist in iTunes than any other group (for the record, the non-album cover of "Common People" by William Shatner is still sitting at the top of the list). What's funny is that they aren't my seven favorite Decemberists songs. But I guess now we know now which ones the iPod likes the best. |
3.24.06
So in light of their strong live performance on Tuesday night, I've been listening a lot to the two Stereolab records that I own, trying to see if I can hear something more in the songs than I've heard before, and alas, I cannot. I may still pick up one or two of their other discs, because there are tracks that I'd like to hear again even if some of what I liked about them gets muted by the band's choices in the studio, but at this point, I'm praying for a live album. |
3.27.06
"Emma Blowgun's Last Stand" might be the best song Beulah ever recorded. If you hear this and remain unmoved, there's probably something wrong with you. |
3.28.06
Sliced Tongue has been writing recently about his on-again, off-again relationship with the Smiths, and it's actually pretty hard for me to read. The Smiths were my first great musical love, and they've never really been superceded as my favorite band of all time, so reading my friend's more critical evaluation of their catalog is like watching two good friends meet for the first time and slowly coming to the realizatoin that they aren't actually going to get along as well as you hoped.
In light of his entries, I've been going back and listening to the Smiths, and I find myself still just as infatuated as ever. In almost every song, there's at least one line that makes your jaw drop, one hook that your brain won't let go of; the only song in their entire oeuvre that I would excise is the dreadfully preachy and stolidly glum "Meat Is Murder", the title track from their second studio effort.
But then you get this from the same disc:
Scratch my name on your arm with a fountain pen
This means you really love me
That's adolescent love right there in two lines; Morrissey doesn't need to say anything else, that just sums up so much of what it's like falling in love for the first time. And it still gets me.
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3.29.06
16, clumsy and shy
That's the story of my life
Sorry, still have the Smiths on the brain.
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3.30.06
Earlier this week I was wondering if Pitchfork was ever going to get around to reviewing the Gossip's new record, Standing in the Way of Control (which was released back in January), and the next day they reviewed it. Then the iPod played a ton of Cursive songs on one afternoon, and I started wondering what they were up to; the next day Pitchfork had a nice long news article about their next album. Weird. |
3.31.06
I was going to go shopping for some new music today. But I took a nap instead... |
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