2.1.13
It's hard to imagine a truly popular rock/pop album as good or as interesting as Purple Rain. Just wish Prince had a few more like that still in him.
2.4.13 My Bloody Valentine made mbv, the follow up to 1991's classic Loveless, available for purchase online over the weekend. If this album meant anything to you and you somehow escaped seeing this in the last couple of days, head over to their web site to get yours.
2.5.13
There are soooo many things to hate about this latest version of iTunes. Everything about it is unituitive, and lots of the nice little features from previous versions just seem to have vanished. I hope this is one of the apps that Jonny Ive has at the top of his list to get his hands on, because this most recent overhaul is in need of an immediate and drastic overhaul itself.
If I could have one feature back, it would definitely be the list view with my customizable columns with a small image of the album cover. In this version, you have to choose a boring basic list view, or this new album view that only has basic information about the tracks (rating and length). I like perusing other metadata when I'm listening to records as well, like how many times I've listened to a particular song), and having a small image of the album cover helps give a little visual distinctiveness that is now entirely absent from the list view.
If they let me download a previous version, I would do it in a heartbeat——there is nothing in this version that I can't live without, and tons of stuff that I desperately want back.
2.6.13 Desaparecidos, Conor Oberst's anti-corporate punk band who has exactly one album to their name (2002's Read Music Speak Spanish), is streaming two new songs, "Anonymous" (inspired by the Anonymous hacker group) and "The Left Is Right" (inspired by the Occupy movement). For some reason you can't embed this stream, but you can hear it over at the Desaparecidos web site.
I loved their debut back in 2002——that was the same year that Conor Oberst released what is probably Bright Eyes' strongest album, Lifted, and I considered the albums to be near-equals. These songs certainly continue the sound from more than a decade ago, but try not to look at the lyrics too closely——they're a little more ham-handed than I would like (although subtlety was never really the aim with Desparacidos lyrics), and the music for "Anonymous" doesn't mask the words as well as they could.
I'm pleased to see the band return, and nothing would please me more than to see Oberst tap into his youthful rage and angst again, but if I didn't have the context of this band and was listening to the tracks with no other information than the music itself, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me these were done by a 17 year old wannabe who didn't have the skills to be part of Anonymous or the guts to stick it out in an Occupy camp over the winter, someone who was trying to cash in on those movements without actually contributing anything to them.
I don't believe that is Oberst's intent——he is pretty committed to causes like these, and I think he sees them as a parallel to the DIY punk spirit that has heavily influenced his career (both as a musician and a label founder/owner), and this is just his way of paying his respects to fellow warriors in the anti-corporate battlefield. But by choosing to convey a specific message and identify a specific cause,
he almost short-circuits any attempt at genuine rage or meaningful, if more abstract, storytelling.
2.7.13
I'm waiting for an album to change my life, and wondering if those days might be over for me now.
2.8.13
A new release from Thao, We the Common, crept up on me, so I didn't order it until the day it was released, and I didn't receive it until today.
She's one of my favorite artists that no one else seems to have heard of, and while she has yet to make that killer-all-the-way-through album, the overall quality of her records is pretty high, and there are always three or four songs that just blow me away. Usually they are buried in the middle part of the record, but this time she has put the signature track front and center: it is "We the Common", both the title track and the album opener.
I don't know how, in this day and age, an artist like this, who is relatively well-established, expands their fan base——I just don't get how music marketing is supposed to work in an age where radio and MTV are essentially dead, and certainly useless for an artist that doesn't fit some predefined format. But I hope the magic happens for her and she starts getting the exposure she deserves.
2.11.13
New track from the Postal Service, "A Tattered Line of String":
This is new material, not something leftover from the sessions from their brilliant 2003 debut, Give Up, but sadly, this does not herald a new album. Instead, the band is issuing a 10th anniversary edition of Give Up that includes two new songs, of which "A Tattered Line of String" is one.
This one feels a little more Ben Gibbard solo-ey than the tracks on Give Up, but it's still better than most everything on Gibbard's recent solo debut, Former Lives. I wish there really was going to be a whole new album from the Postal Service, but I'm glad to have some new material from them regardless. I just hope they're going to let me buy the two new tracks on iTunes without having to bundle them with the entire rest of the album.
2.12.13
I don't think I'm ever going to believe in my heart that Big Star are as good as my brain tells me I should think they are.
2.13.13 The Strokes released the first single for their upcoming Comedown Machine, "All the Time":
This is a much more typical Strokes song than the first preview from the album, "One Way Trigger", but I'm not sure if it's any better. It's a midtempo rocker, a term that I rarely use in a positive way, and if I'm trying to find a way to praise it, I could say that it sounds like a b-side that was justifiably left off the album relesae of Room On Fire. The production is probably closest thing they've done to their classic sound since their first two albums, but I don't think returning to a comfortable production style is enough to really recommend this song as the signature track for a new album more than a decade into your career.
2.14.13 Marnie Stern has released another new track from her upcoming Chronicles of Marnia, "Nothing Is Easy" (she posted it to SoundCloud, but it won't allow me to embed it, so here's a link to the SoundCloud page).
A very solid track that is unmistakably Marnie——my only small reservation is with the chorus, which seems a little too precious, especially with how close to the front of the mix they've pushed her voice. But my experience with Marnie songs (or song elements) that I've found a little hard to take at first is that I grow into them very quickly and they become some of my favorite things she's written, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear my own opinion change after a few more listens.
2.15.13
I'm trying to break up my reading of the five Game of Thrones books with other books not in that genre, but even after reading Anthony Bourdain'sKitchen Confidential, I still wasn't ready to return to that world, so I bought the Amazon version of A Light That Never Goes Out, a history of the Smiths by Tony Fletcher.
The Smiths are unreservedly my favorite band of all time——I've been in love with everything about them since the first song I heard, "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want". (I have the Pretty in Pink soundtrack to thank for introducing me to their music, but I undoubtedly would have encountered them through some other means around the same time if I hadn't heard them there, and no matter what song had been my first exposure, I think my love for them would have been just as immediate and consuming).
As a happy coincidence, NME just released a video of Johnny Marr talking about how he wrote "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" while in NYC to sign with Sire Records:
It's a fascinating little clip if you can get past those annoying little video scrambles, which seem to be an intentional editing decision and not an encoding issue.
2.18.13
I thought reading a biography of the Smiths would get me focused on re-listening to their catalog, but instead I've gotten very focused on another band from that time period who have absolutely nothing in common with the Smiths: the Cars.
Before this weekend I was certainly aware of the Cars, especially the hit singles that showed up on MTV in the first half of the 80s when I was still transitioning to the college/alt/indie rock that is still my primary musical interest, but I never actually owned a Cars album. But I've been hearing songs that I hadn't heard before on the XM First Wave station, and I've also been recently fascinated with other groups from that period (some of whom were already in my record collection and some of whom were not).
So I decided to ride the impulse and look for a cheap MP3 album or two on Amazon to explore a little further. Due to some weirdness with Amazon's pricing model and the convenient
fact that all of the cheap Cars albums were part of Amazon's new AutoRip service, I ended up buying four out of the first five Cars albums on CD for $5 each and was able to immediately download them for free from my Amazon cloud player.
The records I ended up with were The Cars (their debut), Candy-O, Shake It Up, and Heartbeat City (album number three out of these first five, Panorama, was priced at typical levels, even for the MP3 copy, so I decided to pass until I figured out whether it was worth that investment).
I listened to them in the order that they were released, and although the earlier material is stronger, especially once you get past the hits, it's a pretty solid collection of songs all the way through.
2.19.13
There were two things I was surprised about as I worked my way through the Cars catalog: first, how many of the songs I recognized but didn't realize were Cars tracks. Second, how good some of the songs I've never heard before were, songs like "Lust for Kicks", "Bye Bye Love", "Candy-O", and "Double Life", many of which could have been hits in their own right.
2.20.13
Something that struck me while going through my first two or three listens to this set of Cars albums was the little glimpses of other people's sounds I heard in their songwriting and production. At the point in time when they were making these records, the band lived in some weird nexus that combined elements of Talking Heads, Duran Duran, and Tom Petty——less art-y than Talking Heads, more traditional rock focused than Duran Duran, and poppier than Tom Petty, but somewhere in that same universe with all of them.
There were a lot of times they reminded me of Rick Springfield's work from the same time period——there are songs in both their catalogs that could have just as easily been performed by the other with no significant changes. And now I'm wondering if I shouldn't revisit some of Springfield's early work, too...
2.21.13
I had a very odd moment of revelation while listening to the Cars:
the keyboard hook that grounds "It's All I Can Do" is also, in a sped-up, distorted form, the grounding hook for Julie Ruin's "Breakout-A-Town", my favorite track from her lone record (Julie Ruin is a pseudonym that Bikini Kill'sKathleen Hanna used for a one-off solo project between te end of Bikini Kill and the beginning of Le Tigre, and that album is a good bridge between the other two phases of her career).
I assumed that she had nicked it from somewhere, but I never figured it to be an obscure Cars song, and it was the kind of thing that gives some external validation as to why, when I actually sat down and gave it a real chance, the Cars' music resonated with me so immediately.
2.22.13
After spending a week with the Cars——I've listened to each of the four albums I own about ten times each at this point, and I haven't listened to anything else since I got them——I feel pretty confident about ranking them.
The strongest——but just barely——is their sophomore effort, Candy-O, which, in addition to having one of their most well-known hits ("Let's Go"), also has three great songs I'd never heard before: "Double Life", "Candy-O", and "Lust for Kicks". It's also home to a great, weird little sequence that starts off with "Double Life" before moving into the minute and a half song snippet "Shoo Be Doo" that then explodes into "Candy-O".
For a pop album, especially one with the weight of high commercial expectations after the success of their debut, it's experimental and daring and it still somehow works (unlike the other two songs, "Shoo Be Doo" in itself is not interesting, but putting it on an album like this crammed with radio-friendly guitar pop is a statement, especially given that what seems like a seemless experience when you listened to it on CD was likely broken up on original vinyl and cassette versions).
The second strongest of the bunch is their debut, The Cars, which is so solid through and through and filled with so many of their classic hits that there's almost no need to dissect it further than saying that it's really, really good, and it holds up after over thirty years.
Shake It Up, their fourth album, is next up, but the cracks are starting to show. It's got plenty of good songs, but fewer hits, and there's also a lot of what feels like filler compared to their first two albums. At some point, whether the price comes down or not, I'll probably invest in Panorama, their third release, to see if there's something that happened on that record that would help put Shake It Up into a different context.
Heartbeat City, their fifth record and the first one where they took more than a year between releases (they released one a year starting in 1978 through 1981, and then didn't release this one until 1984), still had some solid tracks, but the second half is almost a complete waste (excepting the mega-hit "You Might Think").
Even though Heartbeat City had three huge hits that probably brought them to the height of their popularity, it looks like they released only one more album before calling it quits, 1987's Door to Door, a record that doesn't seem to have spawned any recognizable hits (there is also an album from 2010, but by 1988 the band had clearly broken up and would stay that way for more than two decades).
I might fill in the remaining gaps in my collection later, but from what I've read of them so far, Panorama and Door to Door are both considered weak compared to these four records, so I could just as easily have these be the only Cars records I ever own and be none the worse off. I think I'm almost ready to listen to something else after immersing myself in these albums for the last week, but I think it's going to be a while before these drop out of my primary playlist.
2.25.13
It occurs to me that buying two thirds of the Cars albums and gorging on nothing but them for a week is the musical equivalent of watching five seasons of a television show on Netflix in a week. This must be what's it's like to grow up now as a teenager these days, with immediate access to the entire history of pop music at your fingertips.
I doubt very seriously that there's anyone with internet access who discovers a band slowly, album by album, over the course of months and years——I'm sure that it's more like discover, consume until you're bored, and move on, maybe never to listen to that music again. How do you even have anything approaching what we would traditionally call a record collection these days?
The must-haves: the Smiths' The Sound of the Smiths (only if you don't already own everything by them, which I assume you do if you own anything by them), Prince'sPurple Rain, Neutral Milk Hotel'sIn the Aeroplane Over the Sea, R.E.M.'sAutomatic for the People, and LCD Soundsystem'sSound of Silver.
As for the worth-owning-espeically-at-this-price, we have PJ Harvey'sLet England Shake, Dirty Projectors' Swing Lo Magellan, Best Coast'sThe Only Place, and Sleigh Bells' Reign of Terror. I'm not planning on buying anything myself this month——there were a couple of older titles that intrigued me, but not enough to go through with the purchase.
2.27.13
New Yeah Yeah Yeahs' track, "Sacrilege":
Not an immediately huge fan of this. It feels like b-side territory compared to the songs on their last couple of albums.
2.28.13
One last Cars note and then I'll (probably) move on for now. My favorite line out of all four albums comes from Candy-O's "It's All I Can Do" (the song the Julie Ruin nicked a sample from for her "Breakout-A-Town"):
