notes - archives - november 2004

11.1.04
Those of you who have been reading this site regularly are probably familiar with my unlikely love for William Shatner's cover of Pulp's "Common People". And my efforts to promote this gem have not been in vain. Over the weekend, I received the following email from my friend Jeff:

Have to admit that I thought you were nuts-o crazy out of your mind about that song. But I downloaded it and listened to it. Not impressed. But for some reason I didn't delete it and I've been going back to it this week. Now I need it. It's like some new kind of addiction. I may have to go find the album.

There's nothing you can do now, Jeff. The Shatner has you.

I had basically the same reaction when I first stumbled on the track a couple of months ago, and I've resisted even looking at a copy of the CD it's on (Shatner's Has Been, a collaboration with Ben Folds) because I know that if it gets in my hands, I'm going to be compelled to buy it, whether I really want to or not. Be very, very careful with this song.

11.2.04
I'm liking Les Savy Fav's Inches more and more——it took the place of Sleater-Kinney during my lawn-mowing session this weekend (which will hopefully be the last time I have to mow the lawn until April). Next time I go to the record store and they still don't have the Arcade Fire's Funeral, I'm picking me up some more Les Savy Fav.

11.3.04
The last album the iPod selected for me before the election yesterday was Ben Harper's There Will Be a Light. Let's hope that's a good omen.

11.4.04
Two other records that the iPod selected for me on election day: Brian Wilson's Smile and Tom Waits' Real Gone. But alas, neither of these was any more prophetic than Ben Harper's There Will Be a Light. Apparently prognostication is not among the iPod's many and varied spooky abilities.

11.5.04
For the past week or so, I've been letting the iPod randomly selected albums for me, first from my 2004 purchases, and more recently from my entire library (the portion of it that's loaded into the iPod, that is). I was pretty happy with this setup, even though it started with two Echo and the Bunnymen albums back to back, the self-titled record and Ocean Rain (that's not because I don't like the band, it's just really weird that out of hundreds of choices, it would randomly choose two albums by the same band back to back). After that I got U2's Boy, The Balancing Act's New Campfire Songs, Morphine's Cure for Pain, and Finley Quaye's Maverick a Strike. Then it tried to play one of my favorite albums from the 80s, the Connells' Boylan Heights, but I was working on a really difficult query and I was a little sleepy, so I switched over to a mix of Les Savy Fav's Inches, the Liars' They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, and the Rapture's Echoes. But the random album thing was a good experiment, and I think I'm going to give that a shot more regularly now.

11.8.04
I finally got around to buying the new Elliott Smith, From a Basement on the Hill (it's pretty good, although it doesn't have as much variety as Figure 8, which I loved), and I also picked up the new Le Tigre (This Island) and Ted Leo (Shake the Streets) while I was at it. I was looking for a few others——the Arcade Fire's Funeral, the Go! Team's Thunder, Lightning, Strike, or Panda Bear's Young Prayer——but none of those were in stock, so I settled on Les Savy Fav's sophomore disc, The Cat and the Cobra (which is good, but not nearly as good as this year's Inches).

Le Tigre have been favorites of mine for a long time, and it's really weird to see them getting national exposure after signing to a major label. Their sound has changed pretty significantly since their debut——there's not nearly as much emphasis on guitars now——and while I mostly like the new disc after a few listens, I can tell you for sure that the cover of the Pointer Sisters' "I'm So Excited" was a major mistake; it's so obviously pandering to a mass audience that it's sickening. It may well become the first song that I delete permanently from iTunes.

Ted Leo became a new hero of mine after last year's Hearts of Oak, and while there's nothing overtly bad about Shake the Streets after the first couple of listens, something seems to be missing. I can't figure out what it is, and maybe this feeling will disappear as I get more familiar with the record, but for right now I'm slightly disappointed. I'd still recommend this record, I'd just recommend Hearts of Oak more.

11.9.04
Huh. I just figured out that the new Ted Leo record is called Shake the Sheets, not Shake the Streets like I've been calling it. But Shake the Streets is a better title, don't you think?

11.10.04
I can't figure out if Yo La Tengo is a great band with some mediocre songs, or just an average band with some really great songs. They've got several five-star rankings in my iTunes library, but they've also got an inordinate number of 2's and 3's.

11.11.04
Ah, iTunes, you've finally given me a reason to love you again. It's been more than two years since Bright Eyes last released an album, and it's going to be another few months before they release their next one (or two, I should say——they plan to release a country-folk-themed disc and a rock-new wave disc on the same day in early 2005), but in the meantime, I can slake my thirst for more Conor Oberst with some iTunes purchases. Bright Eyes recently released two singles, one from each album ("Lua" from I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and "Take It Easy" from Digital Ash in a Digital Urn) along with a total of five b-sides, and while I was anxious to hear them, I'm not enough of a fanatic to pay the $6 or $7 each that the record store would charge for the CD versions. But $.99 a song on iTunes? Done and done.

While I was there, I noticed that Bright Eyes had also released a split EP with Neva Dinova called One Jug of Wine, Two Vessels earlier this year, so I picked that up, too, because, well, I guess I'm really in the mood to hear some new Bright Eyes stuff. So for $12.87, I now have 13 new songs——a whole album's worth——to tide me over until January 25 with the new records make their appearance.

11.12.04
These days, whenever you buy something online, they ask for your email address for confirmation purposes, but of course they promptly turn around and spam you with weekly or daily offers, announcements, and, well, plain old ads. I'd say that about half of the mail that makes it through my spam filter is this pseudo-spam, which I can't unsubscribe to without losing some sort of access to content or easy shopping, even though I generally find it just as annoying and unnecessary as real spam. Every now and then, though, something worthwhile finds its way into my mailbox, like this email from Sufjan Stevens' record label that I got yesterday:

An important announcement from Sufjan Stevens:

My song "To Be Alone With You," from Seven Swans, will be featured on this week's episode of The O.C. on Fox (Thursday Nov. 11 @ 8/7c). Wow! While I haven't actually seen this show on TV, I've been told it's about the courageous work of AIDS relief volunteers in South Africa. So I'm really excited that my song can be part of this philanthropic project. Tune in!——Sufjan

Just brilliant. Because of this email, I'm going to take this time to once again encourage you to buy something of Sufjan's if you haven't heard his music. Seven Swans is his most recent and it's pretty good, but Greetings from Michigan is probably a little better. Either way. Just give this guy some money——you won't regret it.

11.15.04
It appears that Robert Downey Jr. is releasing an album next week. I find this very...disturbing. Maybe he and Juliette Lewis should try some group therapy or something and stop inflicting their psychological damage on the music world.

11.16.04
I don't have anything good to post about today, so instead I'll post some good music-related links for you:

Pitchfork——An obituary for ODB
Wired——An interview with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco about how the music industry needs to wake up and learn to use downloading to their advantage
MacNETv2——Interview with a guy who's trying to download and archive all the music that's been uploaded to the file sharing networks

There. That ought to hold you for a while.

11.17.04
I think the iPod must have a weather sensor buried somewhere in its inards in addition to all the other magic Steve Jobs has stuffed in there. It's been playing mostly fall music recently, quiet Ryan Adams and mellow Tom Waits and lots of Bonnie Prince Billy and Iron and Wine.

11.18.04
Modest Mouse is still probably my favorite band, but in the wake of their surprising success with Good News for People Who Love Bad News, I think the Decemberists are now the band I'm rooting for most to hit it big.

11.19.04
The record store near campus finally had the Arcade Fire's Funeral in stock, and that put me in such a good that, on a whim, I decided to pick up Rufus Wainwright's Want Two even though I'm not that big a fan of Want One and I haven't seen many positive reviews about the sequel.

I knew I would like Funeral, because I've listened the sound clips on iTunes a bunch of times and they always left me wanting more, and it's living up to expectations so far. I'm really surprised at how much I like Want Two, though——I'm a big fan of Poses, slightly less of a fan of Rufus' eponymous debut, and not really a fan of Want One at all, but after listening to Want Two a few times, I'm really digging it. I like Funeral better, but I'm listening to Want Two more because I'm just so pleased that it didn't turn out to be awful.

11.22.04
It's still strange to me that the White Stripes and Modest Mouse are mainstream acts now. I don't think the quality of their music has suffered (at least not yet), so I'm not getting all panicky like I did the first time I heard R.E.M.'s Green or U2's Rattle and Hum. But it's little unsettling——there hasn't been a major revolution in radio and the pop charts like there was when Nirvana hit big and ushered in the grunge era, these bands just had huge albums materialize out of thin air with no real support from radio or their labels' marketing departments. I'm happy for them; it's just a bit odd.

11.23.04
Been listening to the orginal master tapes and demos for Smile, and I have to say, the recently versions recorded by Brian Wilson with his current band the Wondermints lose a lot of the verve from those original sessions. Even though the quality is fairly average and the songs are often incomplete, I think I almost prefer the half-finished songs them to the 2004 recordings. Not that I'm not happy to have those recordings, too——I thoroughly enjoyed Brian Wilson's live version of Pet Sounds with the Wondermints——but I just wish he had prepared a simultaneous release featuring the material from the original Smile sessions, even if they were incomplete.

11.24.04
Despite their occasional toolishness, U2 seems to be the 80s band that is intent on making sure they remain Rock Stars well into the new century. As opposed to say, R.E.M., who, since the departure of drummer Bill Berry, have faded into a ghostly nothingness.

11.29.04
Got the new U2, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, on Wednesday when I was out shopping for Thanksgiving stuff (the Best Buy is right next to the Bed Bath & Beyond, where I bought some pans and kitchen implements). It's not too bad, but just like with All That You Can't Leave Behind, I'm not really feeling the whole classic U2 thing that all the reviewers are going on about, and I think I'm especially qualified to judge because I've managed to find Boy, October, and War used in the past year and I've spent time re-listening to them again for the first time in a decade. In fact, based on my initial few listens, I'd have to judge Leave Behind the better record of these two. But there's really not a huge difference in quality between them; they're both okay records with a few good tracks.

11.30.04

Mixtape: 1987

Track 7
"The Saturday Boy"
Back to Basics
Billy Bragg

Aside from his outstanding work on the first Mermaid Avenue disc with Wilco (in which he and Jeff Tweedy wrote new music to go along with unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics), Back to Basics is really the only thing you need to hear by Billy Bragg. He's still recording today, and occasionally gets some attention in the press for his outspoken political views, but when it come to his music, Basics is as good as it gets. Which is a little ironic, considering that it's a compilation of his first three releases that were all shoved together on this compilation CD in anticipation of his first major label release, Talking With the Taxman About Poetry.

Where Billy went wrong, I think, is getting away from his roots as a neo-electric-protest folkie, where it was just him, his thick cockney accent, and an electric guitar on the stage, with no backing band and nothing to get in the way of his raw emotion. In these early recordings, he was forced to do the job of a whole band by himself, and they really are his most vibrant recordings. When I first heard the CD, I loved it, but I was always wondering how his songs would sound if they had the power of a whole band behind them, and that was a mistake: Bragg has spent pretty much the rest of his career working with other musicians trying to flesh out this sound, and the only time it came even remotely close to working is on his previously mentioned sessions with Wilco on the Mermaid Avenue project. Otherwise, no matter who he has worked with, his music comes off as bland, midtempo rock almost completely devoid of life. I actually wish now that he'd go back and comb through his more recent catalog for his best songs and record them in the same stripped down fashion that he uses on the Back to Basics tracks; I have a feeling they'd come out stronger than they ever could with a full band behind them; that only seems to tone down Billy's emotions.

Normally my first choice for a track off this CD is "Strange Things Happen", which contains some of my favorite lyrics from the 80s: "Strange things happen when you're not around/Our love is so strong it moves objects in my house." But "The Saturday Boy", which tells a tale of a schoolboy's first unrequited love, is a close second, and is a good fit between the Balancing Act's "Whiskered Wife" and the Connells' "Scotty's Lament", both of which also deal with lost love. I guarantee you there's not a boy alive above the age of 10 that can't identify with this song.