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october 2012

10.1.12
I can't figure out if 1) Morrissey really has no intention of getting the Smiths back together but, for publicity's sake, he just likes to openly renew this vow every time some festival offers him an obscene amount of money or 2) he's completely willing to get the Smiths back together for the right dollar amount but no one has hit that number yet.

I don't actually think this will ever happen, because either the former is true or the number he has in mind is more than any sane person would pay. But it's still nice to have a dream.



10.2.12
Dear Lupe Fiasco,

It has never, ever, ever been a good idea to lead off an album with a spoken-word political tirade that would only be grudgingly endured at even the crunchiest of coffee house poetry slams, but it's an especially bad idea to do that on a record that you're positioning as your big comeback after a messy and confusing record that alienated your fans and your record company alike. Yes, it's only two minutes long, but it manages to feel more like ten.

Luckily, Food & Liquor II can only get better from there, and there are some good moments later on the disc. Not enough to justify the inclusion of "Ayesha Says", mind you, but still, some decent stuff, especially compared to the disappointing Lasers.



10.3.12
I've been a fan of Drive-By Truckers since their astounding double album Southern Rock Opera, but while there are usually a few worthwhile tracks on their recent records, the strength of the albums has suffered greatly since Jason Isbell left the band for his own solo career and they started allowing the three remaining principal songwriters (whose abilities vary greatly) to contribute tracks more or less equally to each effort——instead of taking the best ten songs or so, they just let everyone chip in three or four or five until they have an overly long record with no coherent theme and with several guaranteed clunkers.

So I didn't think I was in the market for side projects like Patterson Hood's solo album Murdering Oscar, but I somehow stumbled on it after seeing it in a related purchase list in iTunes or Amazon and I decided to give it a listen. It was released in 2009, but after listening to the clips, it sounded stronger and more worthwhile as a whole album than anything the Truckers have released since 2003's Decoration Day. I was already pretty close to pulling the trigger on it when one of the listener reviews sold me, saying something like, "If you think the Truckers have become a little too democratic, this album's for you."

Bands that have a lot of creative people sometimes struggle with the fact that one member might be able to consistently write eight good songs for every single decent song produced by one or two other members who also fancy themselves songwriters. The truly great bands with this problem are the ones that recognize this and where the weakers songwriters are able to put aside their egos for the sake of the band and in order to create a good or great record instead of a mediocre record with a few good or great songs on it. Belle & Sebastian were headed down a very dangerous road by the time they got to Fold Your Hands Child, and their late-career surge with Dear Catastrophe Waitress and The Life Pursuit is largely due to frontman Stuart Murdoch exercising more control over the band's music and limiting the contributions of his collaborators.

After hearing Murdering Oscar, it's clear that for the DBTs to come anywhere close to the promise they showed from the Southern Rock Opera era, Hood needs to take similar ownership of the band's output, because his solo record is the best album associated with the band since that time (next in line would be the solo albums from ex-bassist Jason Isbell). If the band had continued on that trajectory, this solo album would have been seen not as the best example of the Truckers' sound in nearly decade, but a solid addendum to the band's catalog.



10.8.12
I haven't posted in a few days because I've been out of town on business since last Thursday, but Wednesday night before I left I got a chance to go see David Byrne and St. Vincent play together in support of their recent project Love This Giant. I've been a fan of David Byrne's for years——obviously most of his Talking Heads stuff, but even on and off over the course of his solo career (most notably 2001's Look Into the Eyeball). I don't buy everything he releases, but I'm always curious about it, and although he can be inconsistent, he's rewarding enough to always be paying attention to. I'm a more recent fan of St. Vincent's——her most recent, Cruel, was the first thing I picked up by her——but on paper this seemed like an intriguing pairing, and on the album and the live show it proved to be a good match.

The venue was a concert hall, which in my experience tends to make rock show attendees get to their seats a little faster and pay attention more, but that wasn't the case with this crowd. Even though the show started a good 45 minutes late, we were still three or four songs in before people stopped trying to step over us to get to their seats, and the traffic back and forth for drinks, etc., never really stopped. It was cool to see people dancing in the aisles down below, though (we were in the front row of the second balcony section).

David Byrne was like a little reverse penguin, wearing a white suit (reminiscent of his Stop Making Sense suit, but not as oversized) with a black shirt underneath. On the numbers that where St. Vincent handled the primary vocals, he would join the horn section in their choreographed dance routines, and even when he was in the background, it was hard to take your eyes off him.

The backup band for this show was great. There was a drummer and then another musician playing a station with various keyboards and percussion instruments, but the other six or eight people (besides Byrne and St. Vincent, who would each played guitars) played a brass instrument of some sort, and several of them seemed to switch instruments depending on the song. This made perfect sense for the Love This Giant songs, which feature a lot of horns, but each artist also performed songs from their back catalogue, which were rearranged to suit the horn section. The numbers that benefitted the most from this treatment were Byrne's "Like Humans Do" and St. Vincent's "Cheerleader", although the Talking Heads covers "Burning Down the House" and "Road to Nowhere" got a nice twist from the horn section as well.



10.9.12
I would bet that Cat Power and Kanye West don't generally have a lot of similarities, but here's something they unexpectedly have in common: the embarrassingly gratuitous use of a an eagle's screech on tracks on their respective new albums. Cat Power's comes on the lead single, "Cherokee", which at least has a Native American reference in the title; Kanye's use of virutally the same sound on "Bliss" comes completely out of nowhere, and is one of the rare moments I can recall when listening to his records where I'm asking myself "Why the fuck did he just do that?"



10.10.12
This month's list of 100 MP3 albums for $5 from Amazon is pretty strong compared to last month, when there was nothing I wanted to buy myself and very little that I would recommend. The must-haves are Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' It's Blitz!; highly recommended titles include Bob Mould's latest, Silver Age, Fiona Apple's Tidal, Temple of the Dog's self-titled lone album (featuring a pre-Pearl Jam Eddie Vedder and Soundgarden's Chris Cornell), Elliot Smith's Either/Or, Jens Lekman's I Know What Love Isn't, Dirty Projectors' Swing Lo Magellan (which could end up in he must-have category eventually), and Spoon's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. In a moment of weakness I might also recommend Sting's The Soul Cages, which isn't one of his best solo efforts, but which is probably the last decent album he ever made.

As for me, I'm likely going to buy Bruce Springsteen's classic Born in the USA and Nick Lowe's The Old Magic. In another moment of weakness I might also end up buying Soul Asylum's Delayed Reaction; I have always had a soft spot for this band even though I haven't bought anything of theirs since their brief flirtation with mainstream popularity in the mid-90s, and there's nothing I've heard so far in the clips that would prevent me from giving this relatively recent effort a shot at the $5 price point.



10.11.12
There have been a lot of slow growers for my favorite albums so far this year——Fiona Apple, of Montreal, Grimes, and to a lesser extent, Frack Ocean's Channel Orange. The only two records that have immediately gripped me and still haven't let go are Tennis' Young & Old and Deerhoof's Breakup Song, and that last one especially was a surprise, as it's my favorite album in many years from a band that always has some great songs but which has increasingly been making unlistenable albums by veering off into too many experimental tangents.



10.12.12
I want a new Fiery Furnaces record. Three years is too long. Or at least give me another Eleanor solo album.



10.15.12
I've watched a couple of Saturday Night Live shows this year just to see the musical guests (the weeks Frank Ocean and Passion Pit were on), but they were both a little disappointing (although that's on a relative scale——I had such high expectations for Ocean that he almost had to be a little disappointing).

I got a little excited when Frank Ocean started to play his 10 minute opus "Pyramids", thinking there was no way they had given him clearance to play that long and that they were going to have to make the ugly choice to cut him off mid-song or they were going to have to hastily cut one of their remaining terrible skits, but no, he kicked immediately into the second movement of the track, which fit comfortably into the show's time allotment.



10.16.12
Going to see Jens Lekman tonight. Even though his new album hasn't grown on me that much, I'm still pretty obsessed with him, and I'm hoping that this will be an amazing show.



10.17.12
Ninth anniversary of this site. Needless to say, I have made ZERO progress on the year mixtapes project over the past year, and so I find myself yet again a year farther behind than I was at this time last year.



10.18.12
I forgot to look and see who was opening for Jens Lekman before we went, and it remained a mystery until later in the show when Jens invited them back onstage during his set. It was a female-fronted band, and she seemed to have a northern European accent liks Jens, but the band also used a lot of pedal steel guitar.

It turned out to be Taken By Trees, which is the stage name for Victoria Bergsman (who used to be the lead singer for the Concretes), who is indeed from Jens' home country of Sweden. It was a very serene, ethereal set, and it was a nice way to open the evening. I was running on empty, and had been for a couple of days, but her music was the perfect way to help me escape the stresses of the real world and put myself firmly in concert mode. The crowd was also very chill and seemed to know her stuff pretty well, and that made me feel better about the venue (this was my first show at the Variety Playhouse, and I've had very mixed experiences with Atlanta venues so far).

It's hard for me to write about with any detail because I was in a meditative, trance-like state the whole time (the tallboy beer helped too). The one detail I remember is that they had a tape of ocean waves that started playing before they started the first song, and they kept this in the background the entire show. You could always hear it in between the songs, but every now and then it would make its way into the music itself, and it was always beautiful.

I haven't quite brought myself to buy one of her records yet, but I have a feeling I will sometime soon (and it certainly wouldn't hurt if iTunes or Amazon had one of her albums on sale for $5 to give me the last little push I need).



10.19.12
Jens himself was pretty amazing. I hadn't really taken to the new album, and I was hoping that seeing him perform those songs live would give me a new appreciation for them, and that's exactly what happened. He was also, as expected, a big talker during the show, telling long intro stories to his songs, or even fleshing the narratives out with additional details during the songs themselves. He's such a good storyteller in his songs that some of it seemed redundant, but it was still welcome——it just highlighted how well the songs already stood on their own without additional details.

I've imagined what it would be like to see Jens play live for a long time, and this show was everything I hoped it would be. Sometimes at shows, even for bands I really like, there comes that moment when you mentally start checking the clock and figuring out just how many more songs the band might play before they let you go home, but there was none of that with Jens. If he had played for five hours, I still would have been thinking, "Is it over already?" I've missed chances to see Jens before, but that won't ever happen again.



10.22.12
When I was reading online reviews of the Variety Playhouse, mostly to figure out the parking situation, it was hard for me to figure out what the interior would look like because the descriptions were so varied: some complained about the lack of space for standing and dancing, others complained that there was a huge gap between the seats and the stage. There were spaces for tables somewhere in this mix, and also a balcony of some sort. All in all it was hard to make any sense of the room I'd be walking into from the comments online.

But they all made sense once I got there: it's an old theater, and so many of the original theater seats are still present in the center of the floor, but there's a large mosh pit area with no seats directly in front of the stage. And along the sides, where the left and right aisle seats used to be, there are now several tiers that have been created with small tables and sets of chairs (usually four per tier). And there is a balcony, but it is set fairly far back (it reminded me more of an old movie theater than a playhouse).

Also: the parking is no big deal if you're not cheap. Lots of people complained about how hard it was to find parking during their visit, and I think that would be true if you were limiting yourself to free on-street parking. But there is a large parking lot behind the venue that only costs $7, and we had no trouble finding parking even though we arrived just before the show was supposed to start. Granted, the place wasn't packed for this show (although there was a pretty good crowd), but still, there was tons of space in the lot when we arrived and when we left. Maybe $7 for parking is expensive in Atlanta, but that's a bargain compared to DC prices near the 9:30 Club, and I have zero problem paying that.



10.23.12
October hasn't been as big for new releases as it usually is (it's typically the last push for sub-mainstream acts to get their albums out before the Christmas crush of major releases hits), but a few new CDs arrived in the mail today: Former Lives, the first solo release from Death Cab for Cutie frontman Benjamin Gibbard, Jason Lytle's (formerly of Grandaddy) sophomore solo album Dept. of Disappearance (that's such a perfect album title for his work that it's hard to believe he hasn't used it before), and Titus Andronicus' long-awaited third album, Local Business.

The Titus disc is the one I'm really psyched about——they might be the most important artists flying the punk flag in the contemporary music scene——but I am curious about the other two as well. The Benjamin Gibbard effort could be a real sleeper——the past couple of Death Cab records are some of their strongest——but by releasing it under his own name, he's also clearly trying to put some distance between these songs and the ones he writes for Death Cab.



10.24.12
Benjamin Gibbard's Former Lives is...weird. And I don't know if I mean that in a good way or not yet. After a couple of listens I understand completely why he didn't want to release this under the Death Cab name.



10.25.12
Not sure what to make of Titus Andronicus' new record Local Business. Patrick Stickles voice sounds a lot less angry and angsty than it did on previous releases——it feels a lot more generically punk, and for me that's not a good thing.

The tracks are on average shorter than they were on the epic (and masterful) The Monitor, but the couple of longer tracks (the 8 minute plus "My Eating Disorder" and the nearly ten minute "Tried to Quit Smoking") don't offer nearly as much payoff as most of the extended tracks on The Monitor (which featured five tracks over seven minutes long, including a fourteen minute closer, and three more tracks over five minutes each). "My Eating Disorder" is more worth your time investment than "Tried to Quit Smoking", but even that track doesn't hold up compared to Monitor standouts "A More Perfect Union" and "Four Score and Seven".

Getting a little more accessible isn't necessarily a bad thing for this band (nothing would make me happier than seeing them become successful enough to know that they'll be able to continue making records for as long as they want), and it's not really fair to hold them to the standards of The Monitor on every outing——there are many great bands out there that could make albums for a hundred years and never come close to pulling off a record that is simultaneously a grand statement on the history of America and an intimate portrait of failed individual relationships.

Still, I had hoped for a little more from this record, and while it's possible that repeated listens will bring it into sharper focus, this is feeling like the weakest release from the band so far. That doesn't make it a bad album by any stretch, but it does make it hard to recommend it as a starting point for people who haven't discovered them yet.



10.26.12
I think Stars' The North might be my favorite lost 80s soundtrack. Now if someone would just make the John Hughes movie that goes with it...



10.29.12
Just found out that Titus Andronicus is playing a show in Atlanta on Wednesday, but I don't think I'll be going for two reasons: first, they're playing a tiny bar with no obvious parking, and I tend to get anxious about parking issues, especially when going to shows solo. Second, they happen to be playing on Halloween, and the neighborhood of the venue is thick with hipster bars, restaurants, and boutiques, meaning it's sure to be hosting crowds much bigger than you would ordinarily find on a random Wednesday in October.

Also, it's a weeknight and I'm old.



10.30.12
It amuses me to no end that Colin Meloy is his Simpsons-ified image from his band's upcoming appearance on the show as the photo on his Twitter feed.



10.31.12
I don't think I've heard "Monster Mash" once yet this Halloween season (yet). Weird.