notes - archives - october 2006

10.9.06
There's no way I'm going to finish the notes for the 1988 mixtape by next week, the anniversary of this site, which means that I'm now officially averaging longer than a year for each mixtape in the year series. In addition to being pretty pathetic, it also means that I'll never even come close to catching up to current years if I don't get serious about this project at some point.

10.10.06
Missed a lot of good new releases while I was out of town on vacation, so as soon as we got back, I went almost immediately to the record store to catch up. I got the Decemberists' The Crane Wife, Robyn Hitchcock's Olé Tarantula, Sean Lennon's Friendly Fire, Beck's The Information, and the Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America. I've only been through them each a couple of times, and they're all pretty decent, although the Lennon disc is probably the weakest.

10.11.06
I like the new Rapture record, Pieces of the People We Love, way more than I should. I was kind of turned off the first time I listened to it, but now when any of the songs from the album pop up on my shuffle, I'm invariably entranced. Conceptually and stylistically, it's not really my kind of record, but something about it has really gotten under my skin. I'm not sure that I would actually recommend it to anyone, but I find myself liking it more and more with each listen.

10.12.06
TV on the Radio has a real gift for penning striking lines that are more like real poetry than rock lyrics have any right to be. The ones that has most recently gotten its hooks into me is from "I Was a Lover", the opening track on Return to Cookie Mountain:

I was a lover
Before this war

You really need to hear it in the context of the song, but believe me, it will get to you just like it gets to me.

10.13.06
There's going to be a benefit for the Harvey Family Memorial Endowment (established in honor of Bryan Harvey and his family, who were slain earlier this year) this Sunday in Charlottesville, VA. See this page for more details.

10.16.06
The Hold Steady's latest, Boys and Girls in America, is no Separation Sunday. But that doesn't mean it's not worth buying. Just buy Separation Sunday first, if you haven't already.

10.17.06
This site is three years old today. It was launched on the third anniversary of my primary site (which means, of course, that the primary site is six today), and for that reason it always seems like a new site to me, even though it has now been in existence for as long as my primary blog had been when I launched it.

At any rate, I'm far behind on the project that was supposed to take up the bulk of the posts on this site, at least for the first few years: my series of mixtapes for each year starting with 1986. Right now, I've only managed to get up to 1988, and I've only written up the first three tracks, which means that I'm still a good ways off from finishing that year and moving on to 1988.

I still think this is a worthwhile project, and I'm going to try to put more effort into catching up. But then again, I've said that every year, and each year I get farther and farther behind. If I can finish 1988 and get 1989 posted by the end of this year, I'll consider that real progress, but I'm not going to make any promises.

10.18.06
Stuck in my head today is a lyric from Cursive's limited edition bonus track, "No News Is Bad News", off their latest album, Happy Hollow:

I'm only getting older
And less interesting

Please don't draw too many inferences between the third anniversary entry yesterday and those lyrics sticking in my head today. I'm sure there's no connection.

Well, I'm pretty sure.

10.19.06
I have a bad habit of buying records from artists that I onced liked about two records longer than I should have, and although I've tried to curb this tendency in recent years, I still fall for it sometimes: I listen to a new record from someone who I know has fallen off in quality, I know that it's no good, and I buy it anyway, more out of loyalty and desperate hope than anything else.

That's not going to happen with the new Badly Drawn Boy (aka Damon Gough), however. His debut, The Hour of Bewilderbeast, is easily defensible as a good album, even a great one (although listening to it now just makes his decline since then all the more painful to ponder), and the About a Boy soundtrack has also held up well over time. Have You Fed the Fish? is where you could see the ship start to go down, but there was enough good material on there that if the follow up had been good, it would have been written off as a minor detour.

But the album that came next, One Plus One Is One, wasn't any good at all; it was one of those records that I knew I shouldn't have bought, because I knew it wasn't going to be any good and I was right. Normally that would have just been the first nail in the Badly Drawn Boy coffin in keeping with my two-bad-albums-before-I-can-quit habit, but listening to tracks from the just released Born in the U.K., I know that I'm done with Damon Gough unless and until he does have some sort of career rebirth, which seems incredibly unlikely.

What really appealed to me about Badly Drawn Boy in the early days was the sense of whimsy and playfulness, which was abundant in his first two records, harder find on Fish, and entirely non-existent on One Plus One. Born in the U.K. actually sounds more appealing than One Plus One in this regard, but that's just in comparison to the dour and unlistenable One Plus One; compared to Bewilderbeast, it's still pretty mopey and subdued.

So, Mr. Gough, I loved you once, and I'll still put up a fight for Bewilderbeast, but you've lost me as a fan unless you wake up from the coma you've been in for the past few years and remember what it was that made us all love your early work. Good luck with the whole pop star thing——the cool kids always pretended to hate you and your stupid hat, but they still put songs from Bewilderbeast on their crush mix tapes.

10.20.06
I don't often get this way, but I'm in a no-music kind of mood. I feel like I need to just shut music off and have some silence around me, maybe for a couple of days. It never lasts long——it's like a cleansing of the aural palate, I guess. It's a little unusual because I just went ten days or so without listening to music on my vacation, but I feel like I'm suffering sensory overload this week——likely a combination of too much to do at work and some kind of flu thing that's making the rounds at the office, one of the side effects of which for me is making me more sensitive to light, sound, smell, etc.

10.23.06
I went on a major Talking Heads bender over the weekend. I'm not sure why, but True Stories and Stop Making Sense were the only Talking Heads CDs I had loaded into iTunes. That error has now been corrected.

10.24.06
"Underground Sun", from Robyn Hitchcock's new album Olé Tarantula, might be the closest thing to a classic Byrds-inspired R.E.M. track that's been released in years. It's not really heavy on the Stipe factor——this sounds more like a collaboration between guitarist Peter Buck and pop-oriented bassist Mike Mills, and that's likely because Robyn's backing band, the Venus Three, includes pop auteur Scott McCaughey of the Minus Five and Mr. Peter Buck himself, a longtime friend of Hitchcock's. There's plenty of Hitchcock's own otherworldly pop weirdness on this track, but it's pretty clear these other two had a pretty big influence on it as well.

10.25.06
The Decemberists have been one of my favorite bands for a while now not just because they make great music, but also because they make consistently great music: they are one of the few bands for which I have purchased just about everthing there is to purchase from them, and which I have no regrets about any of my purchases. Even the 18 minute, five section EP, The Tain, is consistently great in each of its moods; my only annoyance with it is the inability to listen to each section as a separate track (the entire thing is one 18 minute track).

Their new record, The Crane Wife, is mostly more of the same, but with one serious misstep: a 12 minute, three section track called "The Island", which has only a couple of good moments to redeem it. And yes, the whole jam-separate-songs-into-one-track thing bothers me, but if the music is good, then it's really just a minor irritant, which is why I can still love The Tain and even another 11 minute, two part song later on The Crane Wife.

But the music on "The Island" sucks; it's an overindulgent slab of technique over emotion that, at various times, recalls the worst about the Fairport Convention, mid-70s Steve Miller, and, god forbid, the Stonehenge song from Spinal Tap. The Decemberists have danced on some of these lines before, with Colin Meloy's obession with 18th century mannerisms and language and the band's occasional leaning towards prog folk, but whereas their earlier material has acknowledged these impulses with a wink and a nod, this song jumps in wholeheartedly, with expectedly awful results. This shouldn't have even been a fan club b-side released five years from now for the completists; it just shouldn't have been recorded, and it interferes with my ability to enjoy the rest of the album because of my obsessive need to not skip past tracks and listen to the whole album.

Which is shame, because the rest of the album is quite good and lives up to the high standard they've set for themselves. Ordinarily a Decemberists record would be a lock for my annual top 10, but honestly, with as much other good stuff as has been released this year, this one track will be enough to knock The Crane Wife out of the running.

10.26.06

Dear Voxtrot,

Given that your first EP, Raised By Wolves, has been available on iTunes for quite some time now, I'm not sure why you haven't also uploaded your second EP, Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives. I'm hoping that your upcoming release, Your Biggest Fan (with three new tracks), will make its way to iTunes and also spur you to finally upload Mothers, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

If, two weeks from now, iTunes is still lacking these two releases, you'll force me to do something that I very rarely need to do: order music from Amazon.com (because, of course, my local independent record store doesn't carry any Voxtrot releases either). The one positive to this is that I'll also go ahead and pick up a couple of other releases that don't seem like they'll ever be stocked by my local record store, like the Thermals' Fuckin A or the new Chin Up Chin Up record.

10.27.06
One of my favorite sections on the iTunes music store——in fact, the main reason that I make sure to visit the homepage every Tuesday——has simply disappeared from the site. This was the Exclusives section, where they showcased all the releases that you could only get from iTunes. Oh well. Steve Jobs is inscrutable, and I have learned over the years to accept his decisions, as unfathomable as they are to a peon like me.

10.30.06
I think we might be just about done with new releases for the year. There are still a couple that I might pick up——Clinc's Visitations, the Walkmen's Harry Nilsson cover album, the new Chin Up Chin Up——but nothing that I felt compelled to go out and buy the day it was released. I'm sure there are a few more releases that I don't know about because there's no place on the web where you can get an easy to interpret list of new releases, but all the albums I was anticipating this year are already here, especially now that Modest Mouse have moved back their new record from December to sometime next year. Guess it's time to start thinking about those year-end best-of lists.

10.31.06
I'm sick of reading articles about digital music where the author asks "Who buys CDs anymore?"

I do, damn it, I do...