notes - archives - may 2008

5.1.08

Mixtape: 1988

Track 11
"Venice"
Themes From Venus
Love Tractor

I wrote a lot about Love Tractor for the 1986 mixtape, which featured their song "Beatle Boots", and there's not a whole lot more to add here. Themes From Venus was an admirable successor to This Ain't No Outerspace Ship, keeping the same quirky pop sensibilities intact and maybe ratcheting up the oddball quotient a notch or two. But all in all, this seemed like another solid album from a band that was really hitting its stride...until they broke up for more than a decade.

"Satan" was another top choice for this slot, but "Venice" gets me every time with that "lost in passages after midnight" phrase. Both this record and Outerspace Ship, along with their earlier instrumental records, are now available on iTunes, so there's really no excuse not to at least give them a listen if you've never heard them before. Just do us all a favor and avoid the recent stuff, starting with 2005's Black Hole——these aren't true Love Tractor records, as they feature only one person who was in the band during the 80s, and he's basically using the band name to market his solo work (whereas 2001's The Sky at Night features three of the four people who played on this record).

5.2.08

Mixtape: 1988

Track 12
"Out of Reach"
Lovely
The Primitives

This band rose and fell pretty quickly——the fuzz guitar pop of Lovely was widely heralded on the college radio circuit in the US and in the snarky British music press, and they even had a pretty big hit in the UK, but by the time they released their sophomore disc they were at best ignored and at worst ridiculed——I remembered they even canceled a gig in their ostensible hometown of London because they just couldn't sell any tickets.

Still, this is a pretty listenable album, one of those records where it seems like almost any song could be a single. And it's not a stretch to say that the Primitives could be just as strongly linked to the Raveonettes sound as the Jesus and Mary Chain, with whom the Raveonettes are ALWAYS compared. But that just wouldn't be as cool now would it? And that's what the Primitives' brief career really seems to boil down to: they just weren't cool enough to withstand the backlash for whatever reason. And I'm just as guilty as anyone——I can almost guarantee I never heard the follow-up, Pure, but for some reason I never bought it, and I'm the kind of guy who gives pretty much everyone at least one chance to fuck up if I liked their last record.

Lovely is stuffed with armloads of little pop gems, and I'm not ashamed to say I'm still a fan of this record. It's just too bad that I can't tell you what I thought of their next record as well.

5.5.08
I have never heard a guitar sound more like a New Order guitar than during the last minute of Cut Copy's "Hearts on Fire". It's uncanny, and I'm sure it was quite intentional. My only real question is why it isn't done more often.

5.6.08
Toyko Police Club's debut full-length, Elephant Shell, isn't quite as good as the two EPs that preceded it, but it's still pretty good. And they were smart about keeping the songs short: the longest track is just over three minutes, and the average is somewhere in the neighborhood of two and a half minutes——the eleven tracks clock in at right about 28 minutes. So even if you aren't particularly enamored of a certain track, it's over pretty quickly and you don't have time to really get worked up about it. But the songs are pretty true to their earlier sound, and there's nothing on it that you want to skip. It's a good start for them.

5.7.08
Nine Inch Nails just released a new album, The Slip, and you can download it free from their web site. Although there are a couple of instrumental tracks, this isn't all instrumental like the four disc opus they released last fall——this is supposed to be more like a typical NIN release, only without the help of a record company and without any immediate profits. They will be releasing physical versions this summer, but the main point of this album, I think, is to remind you that they are touring this summer, which is how bands these days make most of their money anyway.

5.8.08
I downloaded Animal Collective's new Water Curses EP from iTunes, and it sounds like a pretty solid release so far. The title track is the obvious standout, one of the catchier songs they've ever released, whereas the other songs are a bit more contemplative. But if you're a fan, you'll probably want to pick this up.

5.9.08
Radiohead coming up this Sunday. I was hoping to go with Sliced Tongue, but both of us forgot until a few days ago that this Sunday is also Mother's Day, which isn't the best time to tell your wife and the mother of your two children that you're going to spend half the day hanging out with a grad school friend watching an artsy British rock band. So I'll be going with my wife instead, who doesn't dislike Radiohead, but who would have been perfectly happy to have Sliced Tongue go in her place.

This will be the first time I've seen them play live, but I'm trying not to get overexcited about it. Because, you know, there's part of me that's screaming "BEST. SHOW. EVER.", but I don't want to come away disappointed from a great performance that just doesn't happen to be the best concert I've seen in my life. But I'm still hoping it will be, because they are undoubtedly the best band of the past fifteen years, and they have a reputation for being amazing live. As long as I walk away feeling like the $100 I spend on each ticket was worth it, I'll be happy.

5.12.08
My Morning Jacket is one of those bands that I know I should like, and I've tried hard to like, but they've just never clicked with me. I've only bought Z so far, and I like a few tracks on there, but I've never seen understood the critical raves they've consistently garnered.

However, after seeing them perform the "I'm Amazed" single from their upcoming Evil Urges album on SNL this past weekend, I can tell you that on the basis of that song alone, I'm going to be buying this record. It's actually been released as a single on iTunes, and although the recorded version doesn't sound nearly as compelling as the SNL performance (and how often can you say that?), it's still a great song.

Recap of the Radiohead show starting tomorrow. What a weird night.

5.13.08
Where to begin with the Radiohead show?

When tickets for this show (at the Nissan Pavilion in Bristow, Virginia, just outside Manassass) originally went on sale, I logged onto Ticketmaster at the appointed hour and went through the ordering process as fast as I could, only to end up with lawn seats. But I wanted better than lawn seats, so I paid close attention to the eBay auctions over the following few days and got lucky with a bid that netted me two seats in the last row of the closest section for only $25 per ticket more than I would have been charged by Ticketmaster.

That turned out to be the best deal I've ever gotten on resold concert tickets given how this concert went down.

Even though the show sold out quickly, including lawn seats, demand for the lawn tickets never seemed really high. I was finally able to sell mine, but at a loss of about $8 per ticket. And again, given how the night turned out, a loss I was happy to eat.

We started heading down to the show around 4:30 in the afternoon; we figured that it would take about two hours because we were avoiding the treacherous and unpredictable DC beltway and instead taking backroads through Frederick and Leesburg that made us drive more miles, but which severely lessened our chances of getting caught up in traffic. Which turned out to be our best decision of the evening, because if we had taken a more conventional route, I think there's a very good chance we would have never seen the show at all.

We stopped for dinner a few miles from the venue - another lucky decision, because we ended up approaching the venue from an out of the way route instead of joining the masses on I-66 and using the official exit. There was no traffic at all for us until we got a half mile or so from the venue, where we merged with the eastbound 66 traffic and crept slowly towards the entrance to the closest parking. By the time we were waved in, it was almost full——my assumption at the time was that they would then open up another lot, and I kind of cursed that fact that we were not only at the back of the lot, but we were also at the far end of our row, meaning that we would likely be some of the last people to leave.

But we were lucky just to get a spot at all; there were no more parking lots——as I would discover later, both the A and B lot filled up shortly after we got there, and after that, because of the weather conditions, there was nowhere else to put people.

5.14.08
And the weather. We knew it was going to be ugly, because the forecast called for heavy downpours between 7 and 9 with temperatures in the low 50s. That's why we tried to cut it so close with our timing; the less time spent out in the weather that day, the better. Yes, we had seats under the roof (although not as under as they could have been), but it was going to be cold, wet, and miserable no matter what.

But honestly, I couldn't have imagined what we actually experienced. The parking lot, which luckily had a deep layer of heavy gravel over the dirt, was already running with rivulets and small streams of water by the time we parked and started our walk towards the pavilion, and the rain was falling so hard and the water was flowing so deep over every surface that by the time we got to our seats, our shoes and legs were soaked.

We thought we'd be safe once we got to our seats because they were under the enclosed part of the pavilion, but we were only 20-30 seats from the edge, and the wind just happened to be blowing so that it brought the rain over to our seats (and farther). Most of the time it was just a fine mist, but there were times when it was raining hard enough and wind was strong enough that it was still rain by the time it got to us.

It was a miserable night, but strangely I wasn't miserable. I was cold and wet and worried about getting out of the parking lot after the show if the rain kept up, but I was there with thousands of other people (including hundreds of brave souls who had lawn tickets who were actually standing out in that weather with nothing but cheap plastic ponchos and a sea of umbrellas to keep them from getting soaked) who were all there to see a band they loved. Considering that Radiohead focuses so much on the alienation and isolation of modern life, there was a real sense of human connection in the building that night, even before the band came on stage.

5.15.08
The show itself was pretty good. We got to our seats just as opening act Liars were starting their set, which lasted for about 45 minutes. I only own two Liars albums——their first one, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, which is much more protopunk-oriented than the albums that followed it, and their most recent self-titled record, which has more in common with the two albums released in the interim but which is a bit more accessible.

They didn't play anything from the first record, which makes sense, because they've made a clear choice to steer their ship into more experimental waters, but I recognized a good number of the songs, which means that a lot of the setlist was taken from the most recent work. They played my three favorite songs from Liars——"Plaster Casts of Everything", "Houseclouds" (one of my favorite songs from last year), and "Clear Island"——but I don't think they played either of the two non-album tracks from the Plaster Casts of Everything EP, which is a shame because I love both of those tracks more than most of the stuff on the album.

When Liars finished playing, it took another 45 minutes for the stage crew to get things set up for Radiohead who came on just before 9 p.m. with the rain still pouring down and showing no signs of letting up.

5.16.08
Here's Radiohead's setlist:

1. All I Need
2. Jigsaw Falling Into Place
3. Lucky
4. 15 Step
5. Nude
6. Pyramid Song
7. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
8. Myxomatosis
9. Idioteque
10. Faust Arp
11. Videotape
12. Paranoid Android
13. Just
14. Reckoner
15. Everything In Its Right Place
16. Bangers and Mash
17. Bodysnatchers

Encore 1:
18. Like Spinning Plates
19. Optimistic
20. Karma Police
21. Go Slowly
22. Planet Telex

Encore 2:
23. Fake Plastic Trees
24. The National Anthem
25. House of Cards

So here's the breakdown: 10 songs from In Rainbows (including the bonus material that was released as part of the deluxe box set), 4 from Kid A, 3 each from The Bends and OK Computer, 2 from Amnesiac, 1 from Hail to the Thief, 1 unreleased song, and zero from Pablo Honey.

The only songs I didn't own were the unreleased track ("Go Slowly") and "Bangers and Mash", which was part of the bonus material for In Rainbows that hasn't been made available for legal download or mass CD distribution yet (I've since acquired the 8 bonus tracks from the box set via BitTorrent, so my iTunes recreation of the setlist only lacks the unreleased track).

I didn't get to hear my favorite Radiohead song, "Subterranean Homesick Alien", but with "Pyramid Song", "Paranoid Android", "The National Anthem", and "Karma Police", there's not a lot to complain about. Thom had a bit of trouble with an acoustic version of "Faust Arp", starting and stopping twice before finally getting into the right rhythm, and he also exchanged his guitar for a very simple drum kit on "Bangers and Mash", which he played with the same wild abandoned that his on stage dancing is known for.

Aside from "Subterranean Homesick Alien", "Paranoid Android" was probably the song I was most hoping to hear, and I had a good feeling when Thom introduced it by saying "This is a nasty song." And when he sang the "rain down on me" part of the song, the wind had shifted and we actually were getting rained on, which was...well, it's really hard to share those transcendant concert moments on paper without sounding overly sentimental, but it was a pretty cool.

5.19.08
Aside from the music, Radiohead's stage setup was also really cool. It consisted of a small forest of tubes that hung down from the ceiling, surrounding the band on the edges of the stage and hanging over their heads in the performance area. I'm still not sure how they did——maybe LEDs embedding within the tubes, or lights being projected onto a reflective material over the tubes——but these tubes would light up with a rainbow of colors, from the brightest white to the deepest blues and purples, or a kaliedoscope of many colors at once (if you want to see some photos, search Flickr for Radiohead Bristow).

It was perfect for Radiohead. Minimalist and infinitely variable, complex and simple. There may yet be opportunities in my life to see Radiohead live again, but I'm betting this stage show is only for this tour, and that was almost worth the price of admission all on its own.

5.20.08
Getting out of the Radiohead show was a complete nightmare; the paths back to the parking lots were flooding with small torrential streams, and the parking lots themselves were turning into swamps. Even though it took us a while to get to our car, it took us more than an hour to get out of the lot, and the vast majority of the time we were just sitting; we were probably among the last 50 or so cars out of the lot. And after that, we were directed by police to take a long series of poorly marked back roads to get to 66, although we were smart and went away from DC and used our Leesburg route to get back up to Maryland.

We won't forget this show anytime soon, both the good and the bad. Given the terrible experiences many fans had trying to get to the show, many of whom never made it due to poor preparation by the venue, we were actually pretty lucky even though there were a lot of miserable moments that night.

5.21.08
I've given Tapes n' Tapes' Walk It Off enough listens now, and it's just not getting any better. I was really looking forward to this release——The Loon held such promise——but I guess now I have to hope that Walk It Off was an aberration and that their future releases will measure up to the standards of their debut.

5.27.08
Picked up a few things over the long weekend: Death Cab for Cutie's Narrow Stairs, No Age's Nouns, the National's Boxer, and Islands' Arm's Way. They also had No Age's Weirdo Rippers used, so I picked that up as well. Haven't really formed an opinion of any of them yet, as I've been too busy to give them a serious listen, but I have high hopes for No Age.

5.28.08
Four of my weekend purchases came from the record store closest to my house, but they didn't have the National's Boxer and a couple of other items on my list, so when I found myself near another branch of the same store in the cit over the weekend, I stopped in to see if the selection would be any better. They only had the National, but still, that was another item to cross off my want list.

When I presented the CD to the cashier, she said, "Wow, you're really lucky to get this——every time we get a copy in stock it sells out immediately." Which kind of begs the question: why don't order, say, five copies, or ten, instead of just one, so your customers don't keep walking away frustrated because they didn't happen to be the first person to find it after restocking? I mean, it shouldn't be surprising that the CD is in relatively high demand——it's been building buzz since last year, and they are the opening act on the Modest Mouse/R.E.M. tour that's going to make a stop in Columbia in a few weeks.

Record stores are probably doomed no matter what they do, but they certainly aren't helping themselves by doing dumb things like this.

5.29.08
I was talking about the Radiohead show with Benn from Atomic POP and he mentioned that one of his friends was one of the doubly unlucky folks who both missed the Bristow show because the parking lots were full and attended the show a few years back in Virginia where the band finished their soundcheck and then the concert was canceled due to lightning. You know, Radiohead, there's a perfectly good venue in Columbia, MD, that doesn't seem affected by these problems——maybe next time you want to schedule a DC-area show, you should think about staying the hell out of Virginia.

Benn also said he had a link to a recording of the Bristow show, but when he sent it to me in IM a couple of days later, it was dead. But it motivated me to poke around Google a bit, and I found another version out there on teh interwebs. The quality isn't great, especially on the quiet songs, but it's nice to have it to help jog my memory years from now.

I've never understood why that fad a few years back where you could buy a CD of the concert you attended for an extra $15 or $20 never caught on——the technology seemed to work fine, and I have to imagine that many, many more fans would splurg for that than they would a $30 t-shirt (or however much they sell for these days).

5.30.08
I am sick in love with the Unicorns' lone album and the debut CD from Islands, the new home for Unicorns co-leader Nick Thorburn, but the just-released Arm's Way leaves me cold. I really wanted to like this record——really, really wanted to like it——but after several listens, I can barely even find moments that remind me why I love this band, much less entire songs, and certainly not the album as a whole. Very disappointing——I was hoping this release could carry me through the summer like the last one did.