notes - archives - december 2006

12.1.06
One of my favorite songs from this year's self-titled Minus 5 record is "Cemetery Row", which features the Decemberists' Colin Meloy on lead vocals. One of my favorite lyrics on that album, however, comes from a different song, "My Life as a Creep":

Ask me for a moment to reflect
And I will tell you where I was when it went down
Show me where the lines can reconnect
And I will parallelogram you to the ground

I don't know what it is about using parallelogram as a verb, but it pulls the whole thing together and makes an otherwise average verse into something brilliant.

Now, the Minus 5, a loose collective anchored by the songwriting of frontman Scott McCaughey, shares a record label, Yep Roc, with Robyn Hitchcock, who also released a record this year (Olé Tarantula!) under the moniker Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3. Two of those three are also members of the Minus 5, Scott McCaughey himself and R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck. Tarantula features a song called "'Cause It's Love (Saint Parallelogram)", and although the connection isn't clear to me, I'd like to believe that this song was in some way inspired by McCaughey's use of the word parallelogram in "My Life as a Creep".

Interestingly enough, Hitchcock's paralellogram song was co-written with Andy Partridge of XTC fame, who rebounded with a pair of pretty good records in 1999 and 2000 after taking a few years off while feuding with their record label. It seemed that they were well on their way to reestablishing their prominent place in pop music, but since those two records, there has been nothing but silence; even rumors of a collaboration between Partridge and the Apples in Stereo's Robert Schneider never came to fruition.

So how do we close this loop? It seems pretty obvious to me: XTC needs to sign with Yep Roc and Andy Partridge needs to work on a track with Colin Meloy, who shares his affinity for traditional English melodies and modern pop hooks. And if the lyrics should happen to feature references to a certain non-rectangular geometric shape, so much the better.

12.4.06
This just in: Ryan Adams has officially lost his mind. But it's gonna be kinda fun to see what happens next.

If you can make it past the song that plays when you first get into the interface, be sure to click on the Cardinals Radio text to get undeniable evidence of Ryan's unbalanced mental state. Dotcom motherfucker!

12.5.06
You know, when it first debuted, I felt like the iTunes music store was a cool little place where artists I liked might get showcased and almost every week there was something worth downloading. The focus wasn't so much on the big artists, who hadn't necessarily bought into the whole legal online download thing, but on the smaller bands and labels that were more willing to give it a chance (I remember within a couple of months of the iTunes store launch, they came up with a program to make it easy for independent labels to upload their music to the store).

But that's all changed now; the highlighted artists/albums are generally the megasellers, and the top songs list, which was once a way to judge the crossover/buzz potential of up and coming bands, looks just like the normal Billboard singles chart. Sure, they have a massive selection and a lot more indie and hard-to-find music than the average brick and mortar record store, but it's ridiculously hard to find the content you're looking for sometimes (they have a beta "Just for You" feature that suggests music based on your ratings/purchases, but it sucks just as much as the Amazon system does).

In other words: the spirit of the iTunes music store has changed from local indie music store into just another generic chain store in online form. And that kinda sucks.

12.6.06
Given how much I like Wolf Parade's last record, especially the songs contributed by Spencer Krug, I really expected to like Sunset Rubdown's latest record (it's basically a side project for Krug). I got it soon after it came out and gave it a few listens, but nothing really took, and it kind of dropped off my playlist.

But I've recently rediscovered it, and I think it's much more appropriate for winter listening, because it's resonating with me a lot more strongly than it did earlier. "Us Ones In Between" is especially good, and although I'm not sure if the album will win me over enough to make my 2006 top ten, this single sure has a shot.

12.7.06
I know I just wrote about it, but I can't get over all the craziness on Ryan Adams' website these days. He's now got 13——13!——(and I swear yesterday there were only 12) new and otherwise unreleased albums streaming from the Cardinals Radio section under three different artist names: The Shit (punk), DJ Reggie (lofi electronica), and WereWolph (dark goth metal).

It's too bad you can't download these things, because at some point he's going to come to his senses and take them off the site, and no one who didn't see if for themselves is going to believe that these records ever existed. But they're there now, so go have a look while the crazy is still on public display.

12.8.06
I love Tom Waits, I really do. I missed him like hell during his six year hiatus between The Black Rider (which doesn't get much credit, but which is one of my favorite things he's done) and Mule Variations, which was the start of his latest renaissance. He's recorded a lot of material over the years, and it's sometimes hard to keep up; I was almost hoping that the critics would write off the 56 track Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, his latest release of b-sides, soundtrack singles, and other non-album rarities, as a collection of second rate material for completists only.

But the reviews have been almost universally positive; more than one have said that it's like getting three new Tom Waits albums at once (although honestly, with 56 tracks, aren't we really talking about at least four new records, if not five?). So I think I'm going to have to get it at some point, but with a flood of material like this, I'm going to need to steel myself for it; if I'm not ready to be receptive to it, to really sit down with it for a few days and get to know it, I know it will just end up languishing in a dusty corner of iTunes.

12.11.06
I don't know what I was talking about before when I said Voxtrot's latest EP, Your Biggest Fan, wasn't as good as their earlier stuff. I got really into it this weekend, and now I'm more eager than ever for their debut full-length. In the meantime, for those of you who have yet to experience this band, you can cobble yourself together an album's worth of tracks from their three EPs (which total 13 tracks), all of which are finally available on iTunes. This year actually produced a pretty good crop of records, but if these songs had been released as a coherent unit, they'd still be in the running for my best-of list

12.12.06
Another Tuesday, another complete and utter lack of any interesting new releases. Sigh.

12.13.06
My friend Jeff was the one who introduced me to Chin Up Chin Up——he emails me infrequently (well, more frequently than I email him, but I also update my blog more frequently than he does, so I figure I'm still ahead on sharing information about our lives with one another), but one of his emails last year was sent for the sole purpose of telling me about Chin Up Chin Up's debut album, We Should Have Never Lived Like We Were Skyscrapers.

Their sound is kind of hard to describe——there's some Modest Mouse, some Sunny Day Real Estate, some Built to Spill, and a few other influences that I might be able to pin down if I spent some more time thinking about it. The singer's voice sets them apart a bit——most of the time his voice is almost a whisper, occasionally drowning in the overlapping waves of guitar, and he almost always sings in a lower register. But it works——Chin Up Chin Up songs are these dreamy, stream-of-consciousness affairs propelled along by chugging locomotive of a rhythm section, and in most cases it would be disruptive for the vocals to be front and center. It's better for them to be just below the surface, surfacing every now and then before receding back into the currents of intertwining guitar lines.

Anyway, one of Jeff's recent emails to me was requesting some kind of review of Chin Up Chin Up's sophomore record, This Harness Can't Ride Anything, which was just released a couple of months ago. His reasoning for not buying it or even listening to clips of it is that he loves the first record so much that if the second one sucks, he'd rather not know about it and just live with the idealized version of the band he knows from Skyscrapers. And I can kind of respect that, even though, well, you know, it's a litle crazy.

So here it is Jeff: the record's really pretty good. I'm not sure exactly what it was that made you love the first record so much, but the elements I liked are still present on the new record, it's just a little more cleanly recorded and the general tone is a little more upbeat than the tone on Skyscrapers. The singer's voice is also more prominent, but it works with the updated sound just as well as the more subtle use of vocals worked on the first record. My recommendation to a Chin Up Chin Up fan: this one is well worth buying. In fact, that's my recommendation to the rest of you as well.

12.14.06
Still haven't listened to Sufjan Stevens' massive Christmas box set yet, and I guess I'm kind of running out of time. But I haven't really been in the mood, and I don't know whether I'll have any interest at all once the holiday season has passed, given that most of us go into kind of a holiday overload by about December 27. Maybe on the drive home I'll find some motivation to put it on the iPod, but I honestly don't know. Might have to wait til next year.

12.15.06
Sometimes the desperation to find new music this time of year leads to some nice discoveries, because I'm willing to give a serious listen to records that have gotten raves but which didn't do much for me when I listened to samples or a couple of songs.

Probably my favorite band that I discovered this way was Sleater-Kinney; they had a relatively big college radio hit with "Dance Song '97" from their seminal Dig Me Out, but I hated that single and I was unwilling to give the record a try despite near-unanimous praise for it. But then I got stuck with a gift certificate to a Blockbuster music store, and since I was having a hard time finding anything in there that I would consider owning, I pretty much took the first three CDs that I came across that were some sort of counterpoint to the kind of crap that filled most of the racks there. One of these was Dig Me Out, which I then listened to pretty much exclusively for the next month, and I've been a Sleater-Kinney fan ever since.

Anyway. I think I'm just about sold on giving Beirut a try, even though my initial listens to their record a few months back didn't resonate with me. Already I've enjoyed listening to the samples from their record more than I did a few months back; they're what Rufus Wainwright would sound like if Tom Waits had raised him amongst a pack of musically gifted gypsies. Maybe it's that their unique sound isn't getting drowned out by a slew of other records, but whatever the cause, I'm more open to them now, and I'm probably going to pick them up before we start traveling for Christmas next week.

12.18.06
Do I want a new iPod or a Wii more? I'd really like a big shiny new color iPod with a bigger hard drive, a longer-lasting battery, and a smaller form factor, but the one I've had for three years still works pretty well despite a battery that only gets about five hours of play per charge and a casing that has gotten scratched all to hell. I'm really intrigued by the Wii, but I'm worried that, like its older brother the Gamecube, it won't hold my attention for all that long, especially with the expansion pack for World of Warcraft looming.

There's also a good chance that the Wii will be unattainable before Christmas for mere mortals like me who aren't willing to camp out overnight at the local Best Buy, whereas you can practically get any iPod you want pretty much anywhere that sells MP3 players. What to do, what to do...

12.19.06
As I'm starting to ponder my top 10 list for the year, I amazed to go back and see how much good music was released in 2006. I'm pretty sure I know which albums are going to take the top three slots (although I don't yet know the exact order), but spots 4 through 10 are totally up for grabs. There are easily 20 records that could end up there, which means I'm going to have to get serious about listening to some of the good records that I didn't spend as much time with as I would have liked to, records like Tapes 'n Tapes' The Loon, the Figurines' Skeleton, and Cursive's Happy Hollow.

12.20.06
You must watch the Colbert Report tonight. He and the Decemberists are having a guitar duel to settle a dispute about who thought up the fans-complete-the-greenscreen-video contest first. If the Decemberists engaging a fake news blowhard in a musical deathmatch doesn't sound like entertaining television to you, then you're probably reading the wrong blog.