notes - archives - november 2012

11.2.12
Speaking of Kanye: nothing he has ever done, musically or otherwise, makes me like him less than his recent fling with the abhorrently stupid Kim Kardashian (I'm purposely not bolding her name like I do for most names on this site, because my CSS description for that style is "artist", and I can't put her in that cateory even if it's just HTML code that no one ever sees). I was hoping this would be a monthlong publicity stunt for her reality show or something, but alas, it seems like he's treating it like a real relationship.

Generally, the less you know about the artists you like, the better, but with rap and hip hop, the biography of the artist is pretty integral to understanding the work, since that genre is as much about building a personal mythology as it is about making music, and that's certainly the case with Kanye's discography. The less I know about this part of his life (and the sooner this is behind him, because we all know it's not going to last), the better as far as I'm concerned.

11.5.12
I've hit a serious 90s phase for my daily commute. I thought at first I wanted the 80s, but that wasn't making me happy, so I tried the 90s and it stuck. I probably listened to more hours of music in the 90s than at any other decade that I've been alive, but the music from that period, especially later in the decade, doesn't have the same emotional resonance for me that the 80s does (the 80s were where I spend the bulk of my teenage years). But the 90s are working for me right now, so I'm going to go with it.

11.6.12
A lot of the reviews for Trail of Dead's latest, Lost Songs, focus on its similarities to their masterwork, 2002's Source Tags and Codes, but while I really loved that album at the time, I'm currently more into the kind of stuff they put on their last album, The Tao of the Dead, which I thought was their best in years. I'm likely going to end up giving it a try at some point, because it's getting so many raves, including from sources who have had fun savaging the band for the past half-decade, but my initial partial listen didn't do a whole lot for me.

11.7.12
The Lemonheads' "Stove" gets at me emotionally more than any other song I can think of written about an inanimate object, especially one as everyday and domestic as a stove. I still get instantly melancholy and a little teary eyed whenever I hear it.

11.8.12
I can't imagine that I'll hear anything in the new Soundgarden album that will make me want to buy it, even though they did have a nice long stretch of good albums from 1989-1994. Chris Cornell's solo work and his albums with Rage Against the Machine members under the Audioslave moniker were all well worth avoiding, and if he's going to be the primary createive force behind this new record, there is almost no chance it will be listenable. Still, I've been stuck on the 90s recently, so maybe this release is coming at the perfect time for me to give up my money.

11.9.12
I'm still pretty impressed with Dinosaur Jr.'s recent resurgence with the original lineup, but I really wish frontman J Mascis, who writes the bulk of the band's material, would stop letting bassist Lou Barlow have two tracks per album. I'm sure that's a pretty easy way to keep the peace in the band, but I've never liked his voice, and I never liked his work with Sebadoh, the band he fronted after being kicked out of Dinosaur Jr. I eventually came to love the lo-fi style that they were on the leading edge of, but I never convinced myself to like that band, and that band is all I hear on Barlow's Dinosaur Jr. tracks.

11.12.12
No reviews yet on Pitchfork for either of the first two albums in a series of three that Green Day are supposed to release this year. I haven't bought a Green Day album in many, many years, but they're one of those bands whose success in the pop world has always kept me somewhat interested in their career. They've always gotten reviewed in the past, so I'm trying to figure out if this radio silence means that Pitchfork is saving its savaging for a single review that covers the entire trilogy or if they've now put the band in the too-popular-and-not-good-enough-for-us-to=review-ever-again category.

11.13.12
King Tuff suddenly clicked with me. Their debut record is now a strong contender for my top 10 this year.

11.14.12
New massive Christmas collection from Sufjan Stevens, Silver & Gold. Five discs, three hours of music. As someone who greatly disliked his last album, Age of Adz, and who bought but never really got into his previous box set of Christmas music, Songs for Christmas, I didn't think I'd be that interested in purchasing this one, but now that it's out, I feel drawn to it. It's in the Amazon shopping cart, but not purchased yet. I'll be interested to see how this impulse plays out.

11.15.12
Most of my home music listening is done on my computer these days, which has never been a problem. I have some really nice Yamaha speakers with their own subwoofer unit that I inheirted from a company I worked for when they went out of business, and although they are more than 10 years old at this point, they were top of the line when I got them and still sound better than any computer speakers I've heard that cost under $100.

I've never had any problems with them until we moved into our new house. As soon as I plugged them in, there was static and buzzing, and when one of the cables for the speakers got too close to the power outlet, I could distinctly make out a radio broadcast. I know there are radio towers near hear, and I guess some combination of their proximity, a power outlet that is not truly grounded, and ancient unshielded cables led to me being able to hear radio signals through my speakers.

I tried moving things around, and while I could reduce the interference, I could never get rid of it entirely. I switched to some $40 computer speakers we got for the small tv we keep in the study, and there were no problems at all (I mean, aside from their decidedly inferior sound), so that's what I'm stuck with for now.

I'm moving my office to a new location soon (we're having some work done on the new house, so we won't be fully moved in and unpacked for another month or so), and I'll give the old speakers another try once I'm in my permanent office space. If they still have problems, I guess that's the end of the line for them, and I'll have to start researching some mid- to high-end speakers to replace them.

11.16.12
My goal to rate everything that came out in a given year before that year is over is starting to feel like a real chore right about now. So many mediocre albums in 2012, so little time. I've reached a point where, in order to get through the backlog, I'll play an album all the way through in the background. Any song that pops as something likable (and which is otherwise unrated) will get four stars, anything that annoys me enough to call attention to itself gets two or one, and anything that remains unrated after this process gets three.

Given that I've listened to most of these discs at least five times by the time I decide to employ this method, I think it's a pretty fair way to get things rated and move on.

11.19.12
My wife's car has satellite radio, and although I usually plug my iPhone in and listen to a shuffle mix just like I do when I'm driving my car, recently I've been leaving it on the First Wave station that plays a lot of stuff from the 80s that I like.

The DJs are almost to a person super annoying (Larry the Duck——yes, really——and some woman who is likely half my age and into this music as some sort of retro hipster trip are the two I recall offhand), and they all play way too much Echo & the Bunnymen (but at least they usually stick to the good stuff), but otherwise I haven't felt compelled to change to a different station or plug in my iPhone.

11.20.12
Working my way through Bob Mould's autobiography See A Little Light (also the title of the first single from his first solo album), and I realized that I had somehow managed never to acquire Hüsker Dü's Flip Your Wig, which Mould names as the band's best work.

It's expensive to buy the physical copy these days ($15, even on Amazon), but this is one of those times where I feel like the physical copy is important given that I already know how much I like the band and the fact that everything else I own from them is also the CD version.

11.21.12
In addition to Hüsker Dü's Flip Your Wig, I also ordered the new Sufjan Stevens Christmas box set. He's playing near hear next week, and I'd really like to see this show in person, but it's also on a Monday, so I have my doubts about my ability to make it (if tickets are even still available).

And after listening to Soundgarden's back catalog again and spending some time with the new album samples on iTunes, I also picked up King Animal. I'm not expecting it to be great (although I'm certain it will be better than anything Chris Cornell has been involved with since the last Soundgarden album in 1994), but despite the awful nü metal onslaught that Soundgarden paved the way for (and which you can hear retroactively in some of their more cringe-worthy songs), they were actually a pretty unique band who could have easily milked the gunge wave for several more increasingly stale and mediocre albums and lots and lots of money.

Instead, they broke up while they were still on a relative high note (not the best album of their career, but a solid, listenable effort), and I'm hoping that the full lineup (including drummer Matt Cameron, who has been with Pearl Jam for many years now and was in no need of the cash injection that is often the driver behind these reunion albums) means that there will be some artistic integrity to this album.

11.26.12
The vocals on the track "Wide Eyed" from Animal Collective's Centipede Hz sound just like Andy Partridge from XTC, a comparison I don't remember making with any other Animal Collective song ever.

On top of that, the music is psychedelic in that special 60s way to the point where you could easily mistake the entire song as a lost track from the XTC side project Dukes of the Stratosphere, albeit one that the band would have written ten years ago instead of back in the 80s when the group's lone album was released.

11.27.12
New Prince song, "Rock N' Roll Love Affair", which is clearly a return to his classic sound:

I like it, but there's no way to avoid the fact that "a return to Prince's classic sound" in this case equals him ripping off his Purple Rain track "Take Me With You". That's kind of okay with me, though——I'll take an album of Purple Rain outtakes and retreads any day over anything he's put out over the last 15 years

11.28.12
Having now finished Bob Mould's autobiography See A Little Light, I think I can say that even the most diehard Mould fans wish that the book had been different in two ways: first, he should have a spent a lot more time on the Hüsker Dü years and a lot less time on that long stretch between the end of Sugar and his recent return to a rock sound; and second, that he had been a lot less nice. There are passages when he's pretty cold, and he's especially harsh towards Grant Hart, but overall he was a little too nicey-nicey.

11.29.12
The artwork for Sufjan Stevens' five disc box set of Christmas Music, Silver & Gold, is completely bonkers. I haven't made my way through all the discs yet, but the music is up and down——some of the stuff sounds like outtakes from Michigan and Illinois, and some of it sounds like outtakes from Age of Adz.

No matter which phase of Sufjan's career you enjoy, however, I think we can all agree that we don't need a nine minute plus, autotuned, minor key electronica version of "Do You Hear What I Hear?"

11.30.12
Hüsker Dü's Flip Your Wig might just be my favorite Hüsker Dü after only one listen. I'm kicking myself that it hasn't been a part of my life for the last twenty years.