notes - archives - july 2006

7.05.06
I got a serious late-night craving for Joy Division over the weekend, and realized that I still hadn't loaded either of the two discs I own into iTunes (Unknown Pleasures and the Substance compilation). I quickly remedied that, and they've been on repeat ever since.

I like the way bands like Interpol have brought the Joy Division vibe back into contemporary music, but hearing the originals again, there's really no comparison. "PDA", you're no "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

7.06.06
I got excited when I saw that Pitchfork's featured review yesterday was for TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain, but alas, that's because it was released in the UK earlier this week. Still no firm US release date, but hopefully it will be sometime in August.

7.07.06
Tomorrow is the Belle & Sebastian show down in Columbia, which I'm going to attend with my wife, Sliced Tongue, my brother, our friend Alisa, and someone else that I'll figure out today (we had a sixth, but he had to back out at the last minute).

It should be a pretty good show, but I can't imagine it will be as good as the show at the 9:30 earlier this year; they've expanded their sound quite a bit since their early years, but I still don't really see them being able to properly give a concert in a venue like Merriweather Post Pavillion. Still, I'm pretty psyched about the opening acts, Ted Leo and Broken Social Scene. I'm looking forward to a relaxing evening sitting on the lawn and listening to good music with friends.

7.10.06
The show on Saturday down at Meriweather Post in Columbia was pretty good. Ted Leo turned in an admirably minimalist set, which was limited to half an hour, debuting a couple of new songs in addition to playing some favorites from Hearts of Oak and Shake the Sheets. Broken Social Scene played an awesome set; they were every bit as good as I'd hoped they'd be live, and now I'm driven to see them in a more intimate venue as headliners; their set could have lasted a lot longer. Belle & Sebastian was pretty good, too——Stuart Murdoch was in fine form with his crowd banter (as usual), and the setlist was different enough from when we saw them at the 9:30 earlier this year that I didn't feel like it was just a rehash of that show (although they still had a penchant for playing too many of their weaker, b-side material).

We had tickets for the orchestra pit right in front of the stage, but we ended up just sitting on the lawn for the entire show. It was very pleasant——it was cool to be able to sit back and look at the moon and the clouds and the airplanes passing overhear on their way to BWI——but sitting so far from the speakers, I didn't get that same visceral punch that I get from other live shows. We've seen two other shows at that venue, and both were in the assigned seats section, and I didn't ever feel like the music wasn't as intense as it is in a small club. I don't know——I think the choice to sit on the lawn in the future is going to be determined by the band. But if I had to go to this show over again, I'd probably get up close for Broken Social Scene and stay back on the lawn for Ted Leo and Belle & Sebastian.

7.11.06
One of the reasons that I haven't bought anything recently has been because there just hasn't been that much new stuff that I'm interested in and I like to get a critical mass of 4 or 5 CDs that I want before I make a trip to the record store. But another reason is that one of the CDs I will buy whenever I next go is Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped, and I'm not sure I'm ready to own that one yet.

See, my affection for Sonic Youth has a pretty direct correlation with how much I liked their last record, and I'm still so in love with them from Sonic Nurse, which I think is the best record they've ever made, that I'm not ready to let Rather Ripped change my opinion. By all accounts, Rather Ripped picks up where Sonic Nurse left off, and maybe even distills the tone of that record to even more concise bursts of catchy but complicated guitar interplay, so it's possible I might like it even more than Sonic Nurse.

But I feel like with Sonic Nurse, the band made a kind of peace with their pop impulses (a peace that I wish Fiery Furnaces would hurry up and make, rather than torturing the catchiness out of their songs), and I made peace with their disjointed noise jaunts. Sonic Nurse really struck the perfect balance between these two conflicting impusles, and I'm still digging how well it played to both these strengths.

7.12.06
Thom Yorke's The Eraser (his first solo record) and Sufjan Stevens' Avalanche (a collection of leftovers from the Illinois sessions) both hit stores this week, and even thoughI don't expect either of them to be as good as a new Radiohead record or a fully conceived new album from Sufjan respectively, they're probably going to be enough to get me into the record store to pick up the 5 or 6 releases that I've had on my list for the past couple of months.

The next releases that I'm really looking forward to, however, are TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain (no announced release date, but likely coming sometime in August) and Sparklehorse's long-gestating fourth album, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, due in late September.

I just noticed that both those records have the word "mountain" in the title. Weird.

7.13.06
Been listening to a random shuffle of all the albums I own that were released in 2006, and although there aren't that many that really grabbed hold of me and to the point where I didn't listen to anything else for a couple of weeks, I have to say that this is probably the most consistent crop of records in years. There are few that are solid track by track——at least half of them have a couple of duds——but there are none that I dislike overall, and nearly all of them are records that I look forward to hearing when I have it on random album shuffle and they get selected.

I don't know what's better——to have a bunch of records that vary in quality from good to very good, or to have ones that vary from bad to amazing. I guess in terms of dollars spent, I feel better about the first range because I don't feel like I've wasted my money on anything, but I also kind of wish I had a record this year that I loved as much as I did the Hold Steady's Separation Sunday or Kanye West's Late Registration last year (to name but two of the outstanding albums that were released in 2005).

7.14.06
If you can find a better deal on iTunes that the entire back catalog of remastered original Police records——ranging in price from $5.99 to $9.90, with the total for all five coming to just $36.86——I'd like to know about it. Now if they could just get a U2-like complete recordings collection up there, instead of just the partial version of their box set, we'd be in business.

7.17.06
Robyn Hitchcock has a song on Queen Elvis called "Autumn Sea" that I suspect most people find fairly mediocre. It's a rambling, long-winded track with more than the usual number of tangents and disconnected pieces, both lyrically and musically, (which is saying something for Robyn Hitchcock), but it has an overall tone of melancholy, wry humor, and regret, but a generalized, non-specific regret.

At the very end of the song, after a lengthy spoken-word bit in which a man finds himself turning into a houseplant, Robyn says the word "October". It's more like he's exhaling the word as a sigh than saying it, and it somehow sums up the whole song.

Anyway. Keep this in mind when I say to you: "Monday".

7.18.06
Finally got around to purchasing some new CDs: the Figurines' Skeleton, Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped, the Walkmen's A Hundred Miles Off, Sufjan Stevens' The Avalanche, and Thom Yorke's The Eraser. I also looked for either of the two EPs from Voxtrot, but the record store I went to didn't have them in stock.

I don't have ridiculously high expectations for any of these records, although I like what I've heard so far from the Figurines (kind of a cross between Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and the Shout Out Louds), and I'm guessing that I'll like the Sonic Youth pretty well. As for the rest, I'll let you know what I think once I've had time to absorb them for a bit.

7.19.06
Even though I just bought a bunch of new CDs recently, I couldn't resist also picking up Voxtrot's Raised by Wolves from iTunes after I couldn't find a copy at the record store. This band hits that sweet spot between the Smiths and Belle & Sebastian (even though they're from Texas?), and I'll be damned if I'm going to wait around for the record store to decide they're worth keeping in stock. Now if iTunes would just add their latest EP...

7.20.06
If you asked a Radiohead fan to describe what they might think a Thom Yorke solo album would sound like, they'd likely say something like, "Well, like Radiohead, just without so much stuff." And that's pretty much what you get with The Eraser: a minimalist version of the mechanistic electronica that Radiohead worked into its musical vocabulary with Kid A and Amnesiac.

I happen to really like it, because I really like Radiohead and Thom Yorke's voice. What puzzles me are the negative reviews from other critics who also claim to be Radiohead fans——The Eraser is almost EXACTLY what I expected it to be, and I'm trying to figure out what they thought they'd get from a Thom Yorke solo effort.

Really, I think most of them have been waiting for Radiohead to have a serious misstep since OK Computer so that they can indulge in the seemingly inevitable critical backlash (critics' second favorite activity behind overhyping new bands), but so far the band hasn't made a bad record and this is the closest that the critics are going to get to something they can tear apart.

I guess it's not unexpected, but it is a little disappointing, because it reminds you how much of modern music criticism is really a power struggle between the artists who actually create the music and the critics who only become important by colluding to decide whether a particular band or album is allowed into the pantheon. If you're a Radiohead follower, pay them no mind. The Eraser is a great little record and definitely worth picking up.

7.21.06
My first introduction to Sufjan Stevens was through outtakes, specifcially the outtakes from the Michigan album that he offered as free downloads from his web site for a brief time. Those six songs still contain some of my favorite tracks from Sufjan, specifically "Niagara Falls", "Pickerel Lake", and the demo version of "Vito's Ordination". So I was kinda hoping that his recent album, The Avalanche, which is composed of outtakes from the Illinois album, would be more of the same.

And in fact there are some pretty good songs on it that would have fit right in on the official album, but there are also some that are clearly outtakes. Also: I know "Chicago" is a good song and everything, but did we really need three more versions of it?

At least he didn't try to gouge his fans: I only paid $9 for new copy of the CD, and I'm guessing that you'd be hard pressed to find a place charging more than $10 for it. That's pretty fair, I think, because there are definitely some keepers on this record.

7.24.06
My friend Tom pointed me to Sparklehorse's MySpace page, where "Don't Take My Sunshine Away", a song from the upcoming new record, is available as a stream. I dig the new song, but it always annoys me when bands who've taken the time to create custom web sites keep their MySpace page more updated than the one at their own domain name.

7.25.06
Back when I was working in a high-security facility, where I would wake up at 4 in the morning to drive down to the outskirts of DC so I could miss as much of the rush hour traffic as possible and then work a 12 hour day and head back home for a lonely night of dinner, tv, and fitful sleep in my ground-level one-room efficiency apartment, Radiohead's OK Computer was the perfect soundtrack for my life.

I never saw natural light (the sun hadn't risen when I left for work, I spent all day locked deep within the bowels of a secure facility where the only light allowed was the pale, sickly yellow from overhead flourescents, and by the time I left in the evening the winter sun had long since disappeared), I rarely spoke to other people (my project was different than what anyone else was working on there), I ate mostly canned and highly processed foods, and there were days when I was convinced that most everyone else in the building was a robot and that I was part of some elaborate government-sponsored pscyhological experiment.

Listening to OK Computer either kept me sane or made me even crazier; I listened to it pretty much all the time, whether it was on headphones while I was working in my temporary workspace in a converted closet that was filled with manuals that no one would ever read (and which likely had never been read when the information in them was still relevant) or during my long drives to and from work in the car. At any rate, that record made me feel like I wasn't the only human being in the world, even if the only other human being was Thom Yorke, and he was apparently feeling as depressed and alienated as I was.

Needless to say, I didn't keep that job for very long.

Anyway. If it had been around back then, I think Thom Yorke's The Eraser would have been an even more appropriate soundtrack choice than OK Computer.

Now please quit wasting time on my site and return to your cubicle before we are both reprimanded for non-sanctioned reduction in productivity.

7.26.06
Okay, so Voxtrot's first EP, Raised by Wolves, is available on iTunes, and I have duly downloaded it and played it incessantly. Their second EP, Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives, was released by the same record company here in the US and it has been out for several months at this point, but it's still not available on iTunes. What gives?

I thought at first it might be something where they wanted to sell out the first pressing before releasing it online (which is stupid, but not unheard of with smaller labels), but it looks like the first EP was released on iTunes at pretty much the same time as it went on sale in record stores. Was it a record company oversight? Was there something about the sales of the first EP on iTunes that made them not want to release the second EP there?

I'm completely stumped, and more than a little irritable; I've been trying to work in listens of the other new albums I bought recently, but I'd guess that I've listened Raised by Wolves roughly as much as I've listened to all the other albums put together, and I'd love to be able to add Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives to my playlist without having to mail order it.

7.27.06
So someone explain to me how the Pipettes are not just a novelty act whose shine among the hipsters is going to fade in fairly short order...

7.28.06
Normally when I get a bunch of new CDs at the same time, I put them all into a playlist together and then listen to them on shuffle so I can start to get a flavor for each one of them faster than listening to each of them all the way through. This usually works out pretty well——I very rarely dislike the albums that I buy as a whole, and any less-than-great tracks are evened out by the fact that there's probably a pretty good track from another group coming up on the playlist next.

But with this most recent group of purchases——the Figurines' Skeleton, Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped, the Walkmen's A Hundred Miles Off, Sufjan Stevens' The Avalanche, and Thom Yorke's The Eraser, and Voxtrot's Raised by Wolves——I've found that it's much better to listen to each album as a whole and not mix them up. I'm not quite sure of the reason, other than that almost all of these records are very purposely creating a mood, and plucking out one moment and sticking it next to another very different moment with a very different tone from one of the other records seems to weaken both tracks.

The exceptions are probably the Figurines and Voxtrot, which are full of singles or near-singles that can be sprinkled in liberally with pretty much anything else, and the Sufjan record trends in that direction as well. But the Walkmen, Thom Yorke, and Sonic Youth are all definitely made to be experienced by themselves and in the sequence that they were tracked by the artists——especially with the Walkmen and Sonic Youth, I was less than impressed when I listened to a hodgepodge mix that included songs from the new records, but I grew to like them a lot better when I experienced them as they were presented on the CD.

7.31.06
The new Walkmen record, A Hundred Miles Off, is a real puzzler. I bought their amazing Bows and Arrows last year and was immediately taken with it, and that prompted me to buy Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, which I was considerably less impressed with.

This record seems to fall somewhere in between those two, not reaching the highs of Bows and Arrows but pretty consistently outpacing the work on Everyone. In fact, middling would be a pretty good way to describe this effort: there are none of the rave-ups like "The Rat" and "Little House of Savages" that energized Bows and Arrows, but very little of the draggy, aimless tracks that characterized the weakest songs on Everyone. Everything is medium on this one: the pacing, the track sequencing, the songwriting, the beats. It's not great and it's not terrible, but the fact that it's not great is a disappointment coming on the heels of Bows and Arrows, which was a major breakthrough for the band.

There are some worthwhile tracks, though: the opener, "Louisiana", is a fine song that is only a poor choice to kick off the record because it's better than pretty much anything that follows. "Brandy Alexander" is a warm and intimate little song, and a nice respite from the echoey, clangly tones that dominate many of the tracks on A Hundred Miles. And the cover of Mazarin's "Another One Goes By" would have been brilliant if they had waited another five years; the Walkmen's languid and laconic tone is perfect for a reinterpretation of the song that doesn't in any way diminish the original. The problem is that Mazarin's version was released just last year, and this has the desperate feel of the band trying to find another good song to round off the album and not being able to come up with anything on their own.

It's hard to know whether to recommend this one or not. If you are already a fan of the Walkmen, you're probably going to like it better than most reviewers did, but you're also likely going to be pretty disappointed if Bows and Arrows is your favorite entry in their catalog. For newcomers to the band, Bows and Arrows would obviously be my recommendation, but you'll get a pretty good sense for how good the band can be by listening to "Louisiana" or "Another One Goes By".