notes - archives - february 2009

2.2.09
A new month would seem like an ideal time to break my streak of of Montreal posts, but here's one last one before we move on to other topics. This is in reaction to an observation from a Sliced Tongue post about the new album, Skeletal Lamping:

The last two minutes of "Nonpareil of Favor" is pretty much bliss on a stick.

Now, Mr. Tongue and I share similar tastes in artists, but sometimes our tastes within their respective catalogs can differ greatly. "Nonpareil of Favor" is the opening track from Skeletal Lamping, and the first minute and a half are just what you'd expect on the opener of the follow-up to Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?——a pure, sweet, pop confection with lots of synths and a ridiculous number of BPMs. But the song abruptly shifts tone, and the lyrics "I'm cracking, my sweet love" introduce the breakdown of the first part of the song into the most aggressive, atonal use of guitar's in the band's history.

Now, I've come to appreciate this part of the song, especially when it loops back around and starts incorporating abstract vocals and keyboards that emotionally feel the same to me as the last few minutes of "No Conclusion", which was the final track on the bridge EP that fell between Hissing Fauna and Skeletal Lamping. But it makes complete sense to me that this is the part of the song Sliced Tonuge fell in love with first; he's always had a much higher threshhold for that sort of thing than I do.

2.3.09
I saw the most amazing movie completely by accident last Friday. It was called Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, and I stumbled on it on Turner Classic Movies while flipping through the channels. I missed the first five minutes, and I was instantly hooked. If I had known how rare it was for this to be aired on television these days (it apparently got regular airings in the 80s on the USA network, but hasn't really been on tv since then even though a few devoted fans have had regular screenings in Los Angeles), I would have recorded it, because it's definitely a film I'd like to revisit.

It's one of those awkward, charming movies from the 80s that's something like a John Hughes teen movie that was written and directly by a late-period Wes Anderson. It starred a very young Diane Lane and an even younger-seeming Laura Dern, Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols, Paul Simonon of the Clash, and a couple of members of the Tubes, which just added to the weirdness factor.

There were two songs that were integral to the plot, "I'm a Waste of Time" and "The Professionals", both of which were quite good. It seems odd given indie rock's recent obession with early to mid 80s postpunk that both the movie and the soundtrack (if there was actually a soundtrack——it seems a given for a movie centered around people making music) haven't found more advocates in hipster circles, but it was apparently released on DVD last fall by Rhino (who else?), and maybe it will start airing on TCM more frequently now too. If it does show up on TCM again, you'd be wise to Tivo it.

I'm pretty close to ordering the DVD for myself, but when I purchase a movie, I tend to almost never watch it; found media on live television or even Tivo'd movies tend to hold my attention much better for some reason, maybe because I have the feeling that if I don't watch them soon, they'll be gone, whereas a DVD is always there, available and much less urgently asking for my attention.

2.4.09
The Decemberists are giving away the first single from their upcoming The Hazards of Love album, "The Rake's Song", on their web site, provided you're willing to give them your email address in exchange. It's definitely worth the download——I'm more excited for their new record than I have been in years. I consider myself a pretty big fan——I own all their stuff, many of their songs are in the 4 or 5 star categories in iTunes, and I've seen them live at least six times in the past few years——but their past couple of releases, while containing a lot of good work, have at times veered away from what I love about the band and made me less enthusiastic for their studio output.

"The Rake's Song", however, is an invigorating return from a band that has been uncharacteristically silent for the past couple of years, ever since they canceled a tour after only a few dates due to the illness of an unnamed bandmate. The song starts out with an insistent, throbbing acoustic guitar repeating the same two chords over and over while Colin Meloy starts the narrative. About a minute in, the rest of the band kicks in, with the drums taking musical center stage. This is easily the band's most aggressive track since the second section of The Tain, and if the rest of the new record is as urgent and vital as this song, it's going to be quite a rebirth for them. I don't want to get too excited in case "The Rake's Song" is an outlier, but it's going to be a long few weeks until The Hazards of Love is released in March.

2.5.09
I've been listening to my 4 and 5 star songs from 2008 in anticipation for doing my top 10 lists sometime in the next week or two, and overall it wasn't a bad year. But it wasn't fantastic either; if not for my overwhelming infatuation with of Montreal starting around October, I'm not sure what I would have been listening to between then and now.

It also wasn't a great year for new artists——I think the only debut acts in contention at this point are Vampire Weekend (decent chance), the Cool Kids (might make the top 10 because their record is my favorite hip hop entry this year), and Ra Ra Riot (probably not going to make the top 10 even though I liked their debut reasonably well).

2.6.09
Sometimes there are more advantages to working at home than just being able to skip your 45-minutes-each-way commute and avoid constant interruptions from coworkers while you're trying to get stuff done. Yesterday morning I got an email at 7:30 a.m. alerting me to a surprise show at the 9:30 by Modest Mouse, the tickets for which were going on sale at 10 a.m. So at 10, I logged into the ticket site and was able to grab four tickets, two of which I'll probably sell to cover the cost of the two I'm planning to use.

If I had been at work, I might not have seen that email (it was sent to my personal account), and I also might not have been able to free up time right when the tickets went on sale. As it was, I was able to snag some within the first minute of the sale, which is good, because they were sold out by the third minute.

I've only seen Modest Mouse twice in my life——once in a dingy, temporary club space in Dundalk, Maryland after the release of The Moon and Antarctica but years before they made it big with "Float On", and once as the middle band sandwiched between the National and R.E.M. at an outdoor pavillion last summer. (I was also supposed to see them at the Virgin Festival in Baltimore a couple of years ago, but the idiot festival organizers scheduled them opposite the Police, who I had never seen and who I was far less likely to be able to see ever again. It was kind of a Sophie's choice, but given the circumstances, there's no way I couldn't choose the Police.)

The first show was amazing, everything that I had hoped it would be even given my complete obsession with them at the time (take my recent singlemindedness with of Montreal and multiply it by about 10 over a couple of years instead of six months). My only regret about that show: I got there late and missed the opening band, who I hadn't heard of at the time: the Shins, who were on the verge of releasing their breakthrough record Oh, Inverted World, which would make them household names in the world of indie rock.

The show at Merriweather Post Pavillion (recently famous for being the title of Animal Collective's latest opus) last summer was wrong in all sorts of ways. They didn't get to play very long. The setlist was mostly from their last couple of records. Isaac Brock seemed to want to scream more than he wanted to sing. And on and on. It was a thoroughly dissatisfying experience, especially as I had come thinking that they would have the best set of the three bands, but R.E.M. was much better than Modest Mouse, and the National really blew them both away.

So I'm hoping that the 9:30 Club show, which is part of a short tour consisting mostly of stops at similar-sized venues, will be a chance for them to return to the kinds of shows like the one I saw way back in 2000, rather than the large venue shows they've been playing since 2004. If I'm not blown away by a show in a venue like the 9:30, I don't think there will ever be a point in seeing them play live again.

2.9.09
I picked up my first CDs of 2009, although only one of them was actually released in 2009. That was the much ballyhooed Merriweather Post Pavillion from Animal Collective; the others were Brian Eno and David Byrne's Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, Titus Andronicus' The Airing of Grievances (which recently received a wider re-release thanks to their new label, XL), and the National's Alligator.

I haven't listened to any of them more than once yet, so first impressions coming later in the week as I start to absorb them.

2.10.09
Here's how I would describe Titus Andronicus' The Airing of Grievances to someone who has never heard them: take Conor Oberst's tortured, yelled vocals which were used to best effect on his Los Desaparecidos side project (interestingly, the record he made with that band has the same sort of rage at suburban America that is the central theme of The Airing of Grievances). Then have Oberst take the lead vocalist slot on his brother Frank's postpunk band Sorry About Dresden, throw in a healthy dose of millenial Irish punk influences, and impart the same sort of loose, ramshackle recording process that Oberst employed on mid-period Bright Eyes records like Lifted and Fevers and Mirrors.

Anyway, it's pretty good. I'm going to try to do my top 10 lists for 2008 next week, and I don't know if this will get its hooks into me deep enough before then, but five years from now this could well end up on my revised list of best records of the year.

2.11.09
So I guess the new Decemberists single, "The Rake's Song", isn't free anymore. Now when you go to their web site, instead of seeing an offer to download the song, you instead are directed to purchase it on iTunes. Oh well. It's a great song, but if you're planning to buy the full album in March, it's probably not worth it to pay for it now.

2.12.09
There are, as always some absolutely gorgeous moments on Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion, but overall, I don't think I like it as much as Strawberry Jam, I didn't like Strawberry Jam as much as I liked Panda Bear's Person Pitch. We'll see though——their records tend to be growers, so it could definitely get better with more listens.

2.13.09
Yes, I know it seems like I've been away for a little while. I've actually just been incredibly busy, and even though I've written outlines and drafts every day, they never felt finished enough, and then I suddenly realized that I had hadn't posted in two weeks even though I had two weeks worth of nearly finished content and I had better just sit down and polish them all off in one big writing session. So now they've all been posted.

The short version: I saw a great movie called Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, downloaded a free single from the Decemberists (which is apparently no longer free), got some tickets to Modest Mouse's 9:30 Club show in March, and bought some new CDs. Oh, and I also stopped writing about of Montreal, at least for a few days, although the first entry of this month was still about them.

2.16.09
The National's Alligator isn't anywhere near as good as Boxer, but it's still a pretty good record. I really hope we get a new release from them this year, because they progressed light years between those two records, they've had a couple of years to let some new ideas ferment, and I'm dying to see if they can build on their progress.

2.17.09
I watched the Joe Strummer documentary, The Future Is Unwritten, yesterday after receiving the disc from Netflix last week. Even though I was hoping for a different movie than the one I got (although I'm not sure how to express what I would have wanted different), it was nicely put together, and I can appreciate it as something that Joe himself would have liked. There was some good stuff about his pre-Clash career that I didn't know about (although I'm hardly a hardcore historian of the Clash), and there was a lot of good direct testimony from his bandmates over the years, as well as a lot of commentary from Strummer himself.

I guess one of the disconnects for me was that even though it was clear he had been involved in the making of the film (he provided the voiceover narration for a lot of it), we never see him interviewed on camera like we do for just about everyone else. You only see Strummer in historical footage——even though you constantly hear him speaking to you, you never see him, and that makes a real difference. I think this was probably purposeful, as a way to underscore his absence from this world, but as a document that is meant to summarize the life of someone who so many people still care about and are inspired by, it would have been nice to see him one last time, not in a studio or on the stage, but actually looking us in the eye and speaking right to us.

Still recommended if you are a Clash/Strummer fan though.

2.18.09
It's shocking how little of the Clash's catalog I had loaded into iTunes before last night (only Sandinista and London Calling). And it's even more shocking that I don't even own Give 'Em Enough Rope (although I'm pretty sure I used to own that on cassette). The first situation has now been remedied; the second will be in the near future.

2.19.09
So there's this thing called Bandstocks, which is a web site where fans can invest their own money in the production of an album. This investment not only gives them access to exclusive footage from the recording process and a copy of the finished product, but which can also potentially make them money if the album sells well.

Patrick Wolf is currently using this site to help finance the recording of his next album, and I thought, okay, I can spare at least $10 to invest in this project. It would guarantee me a copy of the album when it is released later this year and I'm likely going to spend at least $10 on it anyway, and it would also give me a chance to participate directly in an experiment which could create an entirely new way for bands to make a living (a similar idea was proposed for television shows——it was once seen as a possible way to revive the much-loved Firefly series from Joss Whedon——but it never moved past the idea stage).

However, when I went to the Bandstocks site to sign up and hand over some of my money, I found the following message on the registration page:

If you are 15 or over and a UK resident, your account will be an "investor account" which means you can buy Bandstocks. Otherwise, your account will be a "supporter account" which means you will not be able to buy Bandstocks.

I've got the over 15 part down, but the UK resident a definite no-go. So I guess I've got to hope for them to set up a US shop, or for someone in the US to rip off this idea, before I can be a direct participant. Watch this site, though——Patrick Wolf is high profile enough that Bandstocks is going to attact a good amount of press once his new album is released, especially if it sells well enough to start paying back dividends to his microinvestors.

2.20.09
My favorite moment on Titus Andronicus' debut CD, The Airing of Grievances, comes during the band-defining "Titus Andronicus" when the singer throws in a "fuck everything, fuck me" (not included on the lyric sheet) during a mini-chorus of "do do dos" in between the first two stretches of lyrics. There's something about the way these words are so casually and impulsively tossed out there that is more emblematic of the band than anything else in the song.

2.23.09
I prefer to buy music on CD from a record store, even though the two alternatives, downloading digital versions or ordering CDs online from Amazon or some other online retailer, offer the same two advantages: I can get my music anytime I want and the stores are never out of stock (the main difference between the two is that I pay a higher price in order to own the physical media and I have to wait a few days for that media to arrive in order to enjoy my purchase).

But of course, the fate of record stores is more and more uncertain (or more and more certain if you're taking the negative view), and I know at some point I'm likely going to make the switch to digital only, which concerns me not only because of the sound quality (and even though eventually, when broadband and storage are no longer a concern, we'll be able to download minimally compressed, very high quality versions of music, no online music retailer has yet committed to allowing users to re-download music they have already purchased for free when it becomes available in a higher quality format), but because it would be all too easy, even with a backup drive, to lose my entire library of digital-only tracks (of course, this should be alleviated in the next few years by daily backups to online storage servers, but we're also a few years away from that being the norm).

In the meantime, while we wait for all of this to firm up, I've found a model that could work for me at Yep Roc, Robyn Hitchcock's current label. See, when you order a CD from their online store, not only do they ship you the physical media, they also allow you to download the tracks immediately from their web site, so you have immediate access to your music and you also get the hard copy for archival purposes. You're still paying a premium for the physical CD, but you get all the benefits of buying it from iTunes. Given that Amazon has warehouses full of CDs and also has a robust online music store, I'm surprised they haven't negotiated the ability to do this with the labels——if they did this, not only would they likely become my preferred vendor for music of any sort, digital or physical, but they'd also get a couple hundred dollars from me almost immediately because I'd be highly motivated to purchase some CDs that have been on my list for a while but which have yet to make an appearance in my local brick and mortar indie record store.

2.24.09
As you may have guessed from yesterday's entry, I purchased Robyn Hitchcock's latest, Goodnight Oslo, from the Yep Roc web site, and although I won't get the physical copy for another several days, I was able to download it and start listening to it immediately.

I'm a longtime fan of Hitchcock's who found a lot to love about his last album, Olé Tarantula (also with the Venus 3, made up of members of the Minus 5 and R.E.M., along with some special guests), but so far, this one just isn't quite measuring up. The production is nice, and there are definitely a few keepers, but overall it's kind of lackluster. Obviously when someone has recorded more than twenty albums and dozens of memorable tracks over the course of thirty years, you cut them some slack, but after the mostly positive reviews of the record, I was hoping for a little more than I'm hearing so far.

2.25.09
I immediately like about every other song on Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion, starting with the second track, "My Girls", and skipping number 10 to jump to 11, "Brother Sport" ("Summertime Clothes", "Bluish", and "Taste" are the other three). The rest are going to take some getting used to, but I think I'll end up rating at least a couple of the others with four starts (opener "In the Flowers" is the song most likely to get that status next).

2.26.09
I picked up a couple of tickets to TV on the Radio's recently-added second show at the 9:30 in June. I saw most of their set at the Virgin Festival a couple of years ago, but that kind of venue just isn't right for them——I'm really looking forward to seeing them in a more intimate environment.

2.27.09
I had something typed up for this space, but I've lost it now and I'm not typing it again, at least not right now.