8.3.09
Marnie Stern took hold of me this weekend, but I think she's almost out of my system for the time being. Even if I continue to grow to love her music, I don't know if she'll ever be someone I recommend to other people——I can't even really describe it, much less recommend it because there's nothing I can compare it to. But I like it more and more each time I listen to it.

8.4.09
New Modest Mouse EP out today. For the past couple of years, I've tended to buy EPs on iTunes, but that's because they're usually hard to find at the local record stores, and since I'm betting that this one won't be, I'm not sure whether I'm going to download it or go look for a physical copy.

One thing that might sway my decision towards downloading is that I've already purchased one of the songs ("I've Got It All(most)", the b-side to the digital "The Good Times Are Killing Me" single), so I can "complete my album" for only $6 on iTunes, and I'm guessing I'm not going to get that kind of deal at record store.

8.5.09
A few months ago I downloaded two space-themed songs I remembered from my childhood——David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Elton John's "Rocket Man"——but I had a nagging feeling that there was a third that I was missing. It turns out it was "Major Tom" by Peter Schilling, which he wrote as a sequel of sorts to Bowie's track.

The problem, unfortunately, is that none of the legal download sites have the original track available, and I can't even find it on the BitTorrent sites (if I had found it, I was considering downloading another track from Peter Schilling to make things square). I find this a little baffling, especially the BitTorrent part——I figured every song that had charted in the past 30 years would have been posted by somebody.

But at least I know for sure that this is the song I was looking for. Now I just have to wait for someone who has the power to do something about it decide that it's worth digitizing...

8.6.09
I made a couple of digital purchases: Modest Mouse's new EP No One's First, and You're Next and Cymbals Eat Guitars' Why There Are Mountains. The former I downloaded because I got a discount for having purchased one song on the EP as a b-side a couple of years ago, and the latter because that's the only way that I've been able to find to get it.

8.7.09
The more I listen to the Smiths' "Jeane", the more I like it. I downloaded it last year when I discovered it on a comp in iTunes, and it hasn't left my daily playlist since. I keep hoping there's this secret trove of unreleased Smiths tracks that are as good as or better than "Jeane", but given how many times this band's music has been rereleased in how many different formats ("Reissue, repackage, repackage" indeed), I know it's not very likely.

8.10.09
It's kind of freaky how much Cymbals Eat Guitars sounds like early Modest Mouse with a bit of Loon-era Tapes 'n Tapes thrown in (although a lot of The Loon reminded me of early Modest Mouse too). That's not a bad thing, I was just surprised because I don't remember the review I read mentioning the similarity and it's very prominent, at least to my ears. I'm really enjoying the record, though, especially as a companion piece to Modest Mouse's latest EP.

I'm a little surprised this band hasn't been signed yet, and I'm curious to see if they'll proceed along the typical path of a label picking them up and re-releasing their debut and then releasing a new record a year or so later. That would acutally be a bit of a bummer, because that means a long wait before we get new music from them, and I'm very eager to hear what they'll do for an encore.

8.11.09
Yesterday my email inbox brought me the original version of Peter Schilling's "Major Tom". My world seems more complete today as a result.

8.12.09
God bless the Fiery Furnaces. I wrote recently that you can never tell what this band is going to do next, and they've proven that once again. Their next actual release will be two re-recordings of their most recent record, I'm Going Away (just released a few weeks ago), that will be solo efforts from each of the Friedberger siblings that will only keep the words from the songs on the original I'm Going Away, and they will release them later this year as two separate records with six songs from each sibling on each of the two records. Got it?

Good, because now comes the confusing stuff. They are also going to release something called Silent Record, which seems to be sheet music and instructions on how to play it (among other things), and the tour for this album will be concerts where Fiery Furnaces fans get together to play the music themselves.

I'm not doing a great job summarizing either of these projects, so head over to their web site to read the official band-approved news items about them. Not that they will necessarily make any more sense to you, but then at least you'll know it's not a failing with my writing.

8.13.09
The new Modest Mouse EP, No One's First, and You're Next, might be my favorite release from them since The Moon and Antarctica. I wouldn't exactly call it a return to their pre-Good News sound, but it's got a lot of offbeat stuff that was recorded during the sessions for their last two albums and doesn't sound quite as slick as most of the stuff that ended up on those records.

The only average song is "The Whale Song" (recently in the news because Heath Ledger directed the video for it shortly before his death), and that only loses points because the first half of the song is essentially a meandering guitar solo——if you only listen to the last three minutes, it's actually one of the better tracks on the EP.

My favorite songs are probably "Perpetual Motion Machine" and "History Sticks to Your Feet". The former is a laconic, bemused meditation on our slow march towards death featuring a New Orleans-style horn section that really makes the song; the latter builds from a quiet guitar loop to a wall of guitar chords and then crashes back to the original starting point.

Overall, this record gives me hope that Modest Mouse could pull an Automatic for the People on me and produce another brilliant full length. But given that this collection is the stuff that they didn't deem good enough to include on their last two albums, they might only be able to do that if they follow their quirkier instincts.

8.14.09
The new Datarock won't be released on CD for another couple of weeks, but the digital download is available now, and it doesn't sound good. I'm pretty bummed about what I've heard so far——their debut was a surprise favorite of mine from 2007, and I had hoped that after Peter Bjorn and John's disappointing follow up to Writer's Block (another favorite of mine from 2007) that was released earlier this year, the new Datarock would make up for it. But it doesn't sound like that's meant to be——very few of the clips I've listened to have that immediate impact that most of the stuff on their debut had for me.

I'll likely still buy it, and I'm guessing there will be at least two or three tracks that I really like, but I don't think I'm going to fall in love with this one.

8.17.09
Okay. Back to the Decemberists concert (my first entry about this show covered the first opening act, Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3). There was also a second opening act, Andrew Bird, and although I can appreciate his music, I'm not really a fan yet, so we used his set to wander around the grounds a bit and get food, etc., before the Decemberists came on. It was actually quite nice to have him playing while we walked around in the cool summer night——I enjoyed it enough that I'm going to give him another serious listen at some point.

The current Decemberists tour is supporting their latest album, a conceptual piece that was originally conceived of as a musical for the theatre called The Hazards of Love. It's got a lot more guitar bluster than most of their releases, and it's also got a lot of guest female vocalists, which was one of my concerns about the live performance when I heard the recorded version——they don't have any full time band members who can do the female vocals (the keyboardist is a woman, but her voice isn't that great).

To get around this problem, frontman Colin Meloy came up with a novel solution: do a tour where the entire first half is the complete album played in order and without any breaks and bring along the two female vocalists who sang the studio versions. The record has been slowly growing on me, but seeing it performed live sealed the deal——it's a little unusual to see throngs of normally reserved Decemberists fans headbanging away, but during the crunchiest guitar numbers, that's exactly what the whole crowd was doing, and while it intially sounds a little cheesy on the album because it's pretty incongruous with the typical Decemberists sound, they really sell it live. I think the first half of that concert might have been my favorite Decemberists performance besides the concert they did with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra a couple of years ago.

The second half of the set was supposed to be a more typical Decemberists set drawn from the rest of their catalog, but because of the curfew at Merriweather, it was a little shorter than most would have liked. The highlight of this set was a cover of Heart's "Crazy on You" that the band totally rocked out (the vocals were done by the two guest female vocalists switching every set of verses). Another treat was "Dracula's Daughter", which Colin explained was the worst song he'd ever written. Here are the lyrics:

Dracula's Daughter's got it bad
You think you got it bad?
Try having Dracula for your dad

There was also a nice little story to accompany this, explaining what a "douchey" chord progression he used and how the jazzy drums just made everything that much worse.

It was a really great show (the seventh row seats didn't hurt), as is typical for this band——the only time I felt like they weren't having as much fun as the audience is when we saw them at the end of a very, very long tour after they had signed to a major label which was clearly expecting big things from them (we had also seen them at a better venue at the beginning of that tour, and that show was amazing).

8.18.09
Free music from Radiohead! Go get it now before they change their minds.

8.19.09
of Montreal might be the best cover band in the world. Also maybe the best band in the world. Or at least the best studio control freak who plays all the instruments on the recorded versions and has a stable touring lineup.

And yes, I've finally given in and started writing of Montreal with the lowercase "o" in of as Kevin Barnes intended. It might take a while for this to be reflected in all the archives, but the changes has been made.

8.20.09
I just found out the singer from Phoenix is married to Sofia Coppola. And she was previously married to Spike Jonze. Weird.

8.21.09
So: "These Are My Twisted Words", the new song that Radiohead is letting people download for free from their site. It's only okay. It would make a good b-side, I guess, but there's nothing particularly interesting about it, other than it seems to be in the same style as their most recent release, In Rainbows (it doesn't feel like it's been almost two years since that record came out).

It doesn't sound like they're planning to release another album anytime soon, so dribs and drabs like this track and their other recent single, "Harry Patch (In Memory Of)" might be all we get for a while. They're threatening that they'll never release another full length again, but they've made noises like that in the past and it never really seemed to come to anything, so I'm not too worried about the longterm future of the band, but it does bum me out a little to know that we're likely at least a year away from a proper batch of new songs.

8.24.09
I've been using last.fm for about a year now to keep track of what I'm listening to (I really need to integrate the feed into this site somehow), but one thing that has always bugged me is that it will often record me listening to a track twice when I've really only listened to it once. I did some research on it, and there were lots of Mac users complaining about it, so I figured it was just a flaw with the Mac client.

So I disabled the last.fm client and installed something called Scrobblepod, which basically does the same stuff as the last.fm client, and for a while it seemed to have fixed the problem. But then the double posting came back one day and persisted, even though I hadn't changed anything, and I figured, well, there's just nothing I can do about it. It's not like it was the end of the world or anything, but for a mildly obsessive person like me, it grated to see my playcounts thrown off by a bug like this.

Then one day last week I was poking around the settings with another iTunes companion app I use, GimmeSomeTune, that fetches album art and lyrics and automatically loads them into your library if they don't already exist, and I noticed that it had a last.fm tab. I switched to the tab, and my account information was entered and enabled. Figuring that maybe this was the source of my problem, I disabled the last.fm connection, and ever since there haven't been any double postings. So I guess it's fixed now, and I guess it's been my stupid fault all along for enabling a last.fm connection in two separate apps.

8.25.09
I got it in my head that I wanted to work on another long term project to write about all the concerts I've ever been to (although given the current state of my year mixtape project, which I'm actually farther behind on than I was when I started this site, I don't know how wise an idea this is).

At first I was just going to wing it and try to remember chronologically without mapping it out, but then I started to realize just how many shows I'd seen and made a spreadsheet to organize things a bit before I started the actual writing. What surprised me about this was that, even though I have seen a good number of shows, it's actually a lot less than I thought once I put them down on paper.

It's still going to be a big project, and part of the reason the number seems smaller is probably because I organized the shows by headliner even though many shows included two or more bands that I plan to write about, but I'm averaging far fewer shows per year than I was expecting.

8.26.09
Bah. Just as I thought I'd worked out all of my last.fm issues, now Scrobblepod isn't writing the stuff I listen to on my iPhone (same settings as always and it's never had that problem before). I never should have written that I'd finally figured out how to make it all work...

8.27.09
I had tickets to see TV on the Radio and the Dirty Projectors at the 9:30 Club back in June, but it was in the middle of a ridiculously hectic week for me and the night after the Decemberists concert at Merriweather Post, and I just didn't have the energy to make the trek down to DC for the show. I don't really regret the decision at this point, because I can still remember just how exhausted I was when I left work the night of the concert, but at some point I think I'm going to look back and wish I had found a way to make it to that show.

8.28.09
We have tickets reserved for this weekend's Virgin Mobile FreeFest in Columbia, but I don't think we'll be going——they've released the schedule, and the three bands that Julie and I collectively want to see (she'd really like to see Mates of State, I'm interested in the National and the Hold Steady) are space pretty evenly across the day, so we'd have to be there for around eight hours to see at most three hours of music. Given that, I'd rather release the tickets and let someone else pick them up who's actually going to go and get more out of it.

8.31.09
I'm not a big fan of instrumental music, especially when it comes in the form of a film score, but holy cow is James Horner's score for Terrence Malick's The New World incredible. If it was a little below the standard $9.99 iTunes price, I probably would have downloaded it already, but I don't know how much longer I'll be able to hold out, especially now that I've sent back the Netflix DVD and I can't watch rewatch the scenes with my favorite compositions.