notes - archives - march 2004

3.1.04
I've been revisiting TV on the Radio's debut EP Young Liars, which made many best-of lists last year despite being only five songs long. I happened to purchase along with several other great records, so it was easy for me to overlook after giving it only a couple of listens, but I'm really digging it now. Aside from the much heralded "Staring at the Sun", I'm also fond of the epic "Blind" (which I think may eventually be remembered as the best song from this EP) and their a cappella version of the Pixies' "Mr. Grieves", which sounds like it's being sung by a barbershop quartet of gravediggers. I'm all the more eager for their first full-length, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes, due later this month along with a slew of other anticipated releases.

3.2.04
I know that "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl" from Broken Social Scene's You Forgot It In People isn't one of their powerhouse numbers, but it is far and away my favorite song on the record. That seemingly endless lyrical repetition at the end——"park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me"——really gets to me. This is a great album all around, but there's something hypnotic about this track, with its slow-building crescendo of banjos, violins, and guitars buttressing the circular structure of the lyrics. If it's possible to reach a meditative state while listening to a rock song (without pharmaceutical aids, that is), then this is the song that would do it for me.

3.3.04
I'm not in the mood to finish my entry on Danger Mouse, and there's apparently this random music meme floating around where you're supposed to randomize your whole music collection in iTunes or Winamp or whatever and then post the first ten songs that come up. So that's what you get from me today:

"Nothing Matters When We're Dancing"
69 Love Songs Volume 1
The Magnetic Fields
"Cause = Time"
You Forgot It In People
Broken Social Scene
"Julia"
The Beatles (The White Album)
The Beatles
"The Return of Evil Bill"
Internal Wrangler
Clinic
"Cities in Dust"
Tinderbox
Siouxsie and the Banshees
"Fragile"
...Nothing Like the Sun
Sting
"Jorge Regula"
The Moldy Peaches
The Moldy Peaches
"Closer"
The Downward Spiral
Nine Inch Nails
"Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before"
Strangeways, Here We Come
The Smiths
"Source Tags and Codes"
Source Tags and Codes
...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead

I only have about 4500 songs loaded onto my Mac (about a third of my total CD collection, which is well over a thousand discs at this point), but this is a surprisingly representative sample considering that it is at most only a tenth of a percent of the songs that I own.

3.4.04
Our new hire at work told me about a jazz singer named Little Jimmy Scott who is coming to sing at a festival in DC next week. She was trying to explain how he sounded, and after dancing around it for a couple of minutes, she just came right out and said it: he sounds like a woman. I'm not really a big jazz fan, but I really wanted to know what this guy sounded like since she had so much trouble describing him. I found some clips on iTunes, and she's right: he sounds like a female vocalist. A very good female vocalist, mind you, but there's no way you would think this was a man if you were listening to it without knowing who it was.

I actually liked the stuff I heard quite a bit——it was pre-60s jazz, which means it was more like big band music than the improvisational noodling that came to characterize the genre in its more recent incarnations. I'd love to see him live, but unfortunately the event is sold out and I already have tickets to see Toni Morrison speak that night anyway. I stopped short of actually purchasing an album, but I have a feeling it won't be too long before my curiosity gets the best of me.

3.5.04
David Byrne's Rei Momo is one of the most disappointing albums ever made. Not because it's not good, but because it utterly fails to capture the spirit and energy of the live performance. I first heard songs for this record when Byrne played SNL, and I jumped at the chance to purchase it when I stumbled on it in the used section a few weeks later. But the recorded versions of the songs were flat and lifeless compared to the live renditions, like robots had tried to recreate the songs in a lab. The compositions themselves are solid, and it's still an instructive album for understanding a lot of Byrne's solo catalog (like the outstanding Look Into the Eyeball), but it could have been brilliant if it had been done right.

3.8.04
I wasn't as enamored of the Books' sophomore release The Lemon of Pink as I was of their debut, Thought for Food, but after listening to it all weekend while working on a paper, I think it might be almost as good as its predecessor.

3.9.04
What in god's name is going on at Saddle Creek? It's been over a year since we've seen releases from Bright Eyes or Los Desaparecidos, the two bands fronted by Conor Oberst, or Cursive or The Good Life, the two bands fronted by Tim Kasher. In a two and a half year period between mid 2000 and early 2003, this two men were directly responsible for 7 complete albums and 3 EPs, most of them among the best records released during that time. But since March of last year, nothing. Don't you guys pull a Modest Mouse on me and make me wait four years for more. And you sure as hell better not re-release a remastered version of your latest album with new artwork before you give me a new record.

3.10.04
Three new additions to the collection: Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes from TV on the Radio, Up in Flames from Manitoba, and Faith from the Cure (used for $7). I haven't listened to anything except the TV on the Radio so far, and I like that pretty well, but I need to absorb it and the other two in the next couple of weeks; when the new Modest Mouse comes out, I'm guessing it's going to dominate my iPod well into the summer (the last one stayed in the regular rotation for over a year).

3.11.04
In the same way that Broken Social Scene is what Godspeed You Black Emperor! would sound like if they tried to write songs with vocals and a beat, Manitoba is what the Avalanches would sound like if they were a real band instead of a DJ collective.

That's a great first sentence for a review I'll probably never write.

3.12.04
If you pay any attention at all to music, you've doubtless heard of the new project by Danger Mouse that mixes vocals from Jay-Z's The Black Album with samples from the Beatles' White Album to produce a genre-busting amalgam known, simply and appropriately, as The Grey Album (I love that he spells grey with an "e", too, the only proper way to spell grey).

You might have also heard about the legal controversy stirred up by the project. Jay-Z's camp has remained silent, but by releasing an a cappella version of the record to DJs and producers, they were practically begging for remixes like this. (In fact, The Grey Album is only one of many, including The Brown Album, The Black Album Unplugged (which uses samples from Nirvana's Unplugged), and The While Albulum. There's even a Jay-Z Construction Set, a CD's worth of material that you can buy on eBay or download from the web that includes several of the remix albums, the a cappella version of The Black Album, and a library of samples, beats, and loops that you can use to make your own remix.) But EMI, which owns the rights to the Beatles catalog, has fired off multiple cease-and-desist letters to everyone from Danger Mouse himself to the owners of web sites that reposted the tracks for download. There's been plenty of outcry at these tactics, mostly on the web, with many sites refusing to take down the songs (if you're interested, Illegal Art is the best one, although they get the title of track 11 wrong; it should be called "Lucifer 9"), and a one-day protest called Grey Tuesday where sites were supposed to either host the songs in defiance of EMI's threats or turn their sites grey for the day. Legally, I'm not sure what they could really do, because no one is selling this thing for profit——Danger Mouse had to spend a lot of time and money to make this thing and distribute it for free, and more than a few of the sites that hosted the sound files are going to have to pay significant overages on bandwidth charges from their ISPs because of all the downloads.

The Grey Album and the resulting fiasco underscore everything that's wrong with the music business today, both artistically and commercially. Since sampling has become such a lucrative business for the copyright holders to old songs, almost no one will use samples anymore, and certainly not in the free-form, guess-where-this-came-from style of the pioneering rap groups from the 80s that gave birth to an art form that's been forced to live underground because of the restrictive and expensive licensing policies of the global music conglomerates (remember when the Verve lost all the royalties to their monster hit "Bittersweet Symphony" because they didn't license an orchestral loop that was actually a symphony playing a Rolling Stones song?). Sure, groups like the Avalanches, the Boards of Canada, and other DJ-oriented acts still spin tons of samples into their expansive musical tapestries, but to be able to afford to make their music legally, they have to have the backing of record label to work out the legal and financial issues. There might be tons of these groups that start out in garages just like traditional rock bands, but it's a lot harder for them to get to the next level because of the hurdles involved with using samples.

In the same way that the record companies never understood the true potential (and inevitability) of file sharing networks, they're missing the boat here. When Napster was still active in its original incarnation and hadn't yet been declared illegal, I downloaded tons of stuff that a) I couldn't get anywhere else, like demos and live tracks, because the record companies didn't understand fans well enough to offer these songs for sale legally and b) that I would never have heard otherwise because I would never have purchased it without hearing the whole album first (and when I did hear something I liked, I went out and bought it, because even though most of them get a distressingly small percentage of the revenue from their work, I still wanted to support them). It is no small irony that these same file trading networks are the primary distribution mechanism for The Grey Album, although I'm sure the karmic aspect of this is lost on the labels and their teams of litigators.

But while they're busy issuing cease and desist letters and suing small-time file traders as a scare tactic, the record companies are missing a huge opportunity to make a significant profit without having to lift a finger or invest any money. Not only would I pay for a copy of The Grey Album if it were possible to do so, I seriously considered purchasing a copy of The Black Album even though I'm not a Jay-Z fan, and I'm sure that there are plenty of his fans who gained a new appreciaton for the Beatles after they heard this project. The Grey Album has undoubtedly increased the sales of the two records from which it draws its sources (I'd love to see the sales figures on The White Album in the three or four weeks following the widespread release of The Grey Album). And since Danger Mouse didn't make any money off it, I have to wonder how illegal it would really be for me to download it if I owned legal copies of The Black Album and The White Album. Haven't I already purchased the right to listen to the sounds on those records however I want to? Or do the record labels now get to dictate the ways in which we can listen to music? How different is this really from making a mixtape from CDs that I own? Isnt' that just fair use?

Projects like this should be allowed to exist, to be born, without undue interference from corporate jackals. Art has always been about sharing ideas, or hell, even outright stealing them; art doesn't belong just to the artist, it belongs to the culture, because without the culture, the artist would have never been able to create the art in the first place. I want artists to get paid, which is why I always legally purchase music I like, even if I can get it for free, but the current system is stifling a lot of good music. Imagine if visual artists weren't allowed to copy other artists' styles or techniques, or filmmakers weren't allowed to shoot in locations or with camera angles that had been used in previous films, or if writers couldn't reference other literary and artistic works. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum, and there shouldn't be an excessive toll for musicians to enter the world of collaborative creation, especially because they're pretty much the only group artists restricted from making their art because of outrageous fees and ridiculously complicated legalities.

Anyway. This turned into a more of an extended rant than I had originally planned, but I hope I've given you some stuff to think about. And if you haven't heard The Grey Album yet, for god's sake go straight to one of those links above and get it. It's an amazing piece of work, and I'll be shocked if it doesn't end up on my top 10 list for 2004. I don't care if you don't like Jay-Z or the Beatles or either, you should give this thing a chance. Do it for the sake of civil disobedience, at least. Who doesn't love to give the finger to the Man every once in a while?

3.15.04
The 1987 mixtape is coming soon, I promise. I thought I had it all worked out last week, but this weekend I spent a lot of time tweaking and rotating three or four different songs in and out of the mix, and I'm not quite 100% on the final track listing. But I'm almost there.

In the meantime, let me wrap up the 1986 mixtape by mentioning a few of the artists that didn't make it and why. First and foremost are the Screaming Blue Messiahs, whose Gun-Shy was one of my favorite releases from that year (it was great at getting me amped up before a lacrosse game). I actually managed to re-acquire it a few years back on CD thanks to eBay, but even though it plays fine on my stereo's CD players, so far I have had no luck converting it to digital files (I've tried on three computers). That is the only reason a track from this record, probably "Wild Blue Yonder", didn't make it to the mix. The same holds true for Guadalcanal Diary's Jamboree and Cactus World News' Urban Beaches: I haven't been able to find CD versions of these records, so I just don't have access to the songs on them anymore.

Another class of songs that were left of the mix were tracks for albums that I bought after 1986 and grew to love, but which I didn't actually listen to that year. These include They Might Be Giants' eponymous debut, Hüsker Dü's Candy Apple Grey, Robyn Hitchcock's Element of Light, the Feelies' The Good Earth, Soul Asylum's Made to be Broken, Throwing Muses' first record, and Game Theory's Big Shot Chronicles. I wouldn't have been able to find room on the list for all of these anyway, but they would have garnered serious consideration for a spot if I had decided that they were appropriate.

A final category, which some of the records in the previous category likely would have fallen into if I had decided to consider them, are records that I listened to a lot in 1986 and that I still love, but that for one reason or another didn't have a song strong enough to make the cut, or which just couldn't find the right place for in the mix. These include the Bolshoi's Friends, the Rainmakers' debut, Fine Young Cannibals' debut, the Dream Syndicate's Out of the Grey, Easterhouse's Contenders, and Big Country's The Seer.

I could probably make a second CD of apocryphal material from the releases that I left out that would be just as good as the mix that I settled on, but that's another project for another day. On to 1987.

3.16.04
First there was the subversive, brilliant cover of the Pixies' "Mr. Grieves" on TV on the Radio's debut EP, Young Liars, followed by touchingly morbid "Ambulance" from their first full length, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes. One hallmark of a truly innovative young band is when they can take a long-dormant genre and make it sound like they were the ones who invented it, and that's exactly what TV on the Radio accomplish on these tracks. They are singlehandedly making a cappella, barbershop quartet-influenced doo-wop relevant again. I know it's hard to believe, but listen to these two songs and tell me I'm wrong.

3.17.04
Yesterday I pointed my two officemates to sites where they could download and listen to Danger Mouse's The Grey Album. One is a 26 year old jock who loves punk groups like the Dropkick Murphys and Rancid, and the other is a married mother of two in her mid-30s whose tastes tend towards blues and jazz (although she does listen to Rage Against the Machine on occasion). And what do you know? Both of them loved it, even though neither of them is a fan of the Beatles or Jay-Z. EMI are a bunch of morons for suing Danger Mouse instead of working out a deal with him so this thing can be properly released and everyone involved can make a mint.

3.18.04
Just over a year ago, on March 1, 2003, I was all set to go meet Tom and his brother down at the Black Cat in DC to see a show by Rilo Kiley and the Good Life. I was really looking forward to it: I was in the early stages of my infatuation with the Good Life and Cursive (both of which are helmed by Tim Kasher), and I was listening to the Rilo Kiley record a lot at that point, too (in fact, my rotation was more or less dominated by these bands and the rest of the Saddle Creek roster, including Bright Eyes, Los Desaparecidos, and Sorry About Dresden).

But for some reason I decided not to go at the last minute. I can't remember if I was feeling sick, or if I was just exhausted, or if I had to go into work the next day and I just needed some down time, but I called Tom that afternoon and told him I wasn't going to meet him at the club after all.

But he still went with his brother, and later that night, when the Good Life launched into their opening number, "Some Bullshit Escape" (which is one of my favorite songs), Tom called me from his cell phone and let the music play into my answering machine until it cut him off. Since that night, his recording has remained on the machine; every now and then I play it back, regretting that I didn't go to the show, but grateful that Tom was able to share a little piece of it with me. It's been more than a year, and barring some accidental pressing of the delete button, I don't think I'm ever going to get rid of it.

3.19.04
You know, if overly-prolific artists like Ryan Adams and Guided By Voices frontman Bob Pollard could learn how to self-edit a little better and not release every single song they write (seriously——take a look at their catalogs, and tell me how it's possible that they could have written and recorded anything that they haven't released), they would probably be much more highly regarded by critics and have a lot more fans like me. As a blogger who keeps two daily blogs, I can certainly understand the impulse to share whatever happens to spill out of my brain with the whole world, but then I don't depend on my audience paying to read my words in order to put food on the table.

The laws of supply and demand don't work in your favor right now, guys——way too much supply and far too little demand. Being your fan means shelling out the money for a new CD at least twice a year, but those two CDs (or more) typically only have a single album's worth of good songs on them. I want to be a fan——some of your songs are among my favorites of all time——but I'm not going to slog through endless should-have-been-b-sides to get the occasional great song. Save up the good stuff for your proper releases, and give the rest to the hardcore fans on rarities compilations. Is that too much to ask?

3.22.04
I finally broke down and ordered Sufjan Stevens' Greetings from Michigan, a record that fell in love with before I'd ever heard it. This is because a few months ago I downloaded (legally, from Sufjan's web site) six outtakes from the Michigan sessions, and I just couldn't get them out of my head. They were beyond brilliant. Ever since then, I've been searching for the album in vain in local stores, even though Sufjan has continued to gain critical praise for his work.

The tipping point for me was the release of Sufjan's Michigan follow-up Seven Swans, a stripped down collection of songs written at the same time as his Michigan tunes. When neither of those records showed up at the local independent music chain the week after Seven Swans was released, and their ordering system didn't even have a listing for Sufjan, I couldn't fool myself into thinking that they were going to catch on any day now and start stocking his discs. So early last week I ordered both records online, and they arrived on Saturday.

Surprisingly, I like Seven Swans better so far, but I think that's because, in tone and style, the songs on it are much closer to the Michigan outtakes that I fell in love with. The real Michigan tracks are fully fleshed out songs with lots of orchestration and accompaniment, whereas the outtakes were more like demos, sketches for songs that never quite made it to the stage where Sufjan gave them the full studio treatment. Seven Swans is also very sparse in most cases, relying on mostly on Sufjan's voice and a few choice backing instruments. That's not to say that I don't like the Michigan stuff, it's just that Seven Swans is more like what I expected Michigan to be.

Anyway. I would tell you to download the outtakes and listen to his songs for yourself, but they have been removed from Sufjan's site due to the decision to include them on limited edition vinyl version of Michigan. You can still listen to streaming version of the real Michigan tracks on his site, but they're pretty poor in quality. Really, you should just go ahead and order the records online like I did. You can thank me for this later by sending me bags full of winning iTunes codes.

3.23.04
"Dreams" might not be the best track from the new TV on the Radio record, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (although it's close), but it just might have the best line:

I know your heart can't grieve
what your eyes won't see
but you were my favorite moment
of our dead century

It took me a little while to warm up to these guys, but I'm quickly becoming a true believer.

3.24.04
The world is getting very strange, my friends. Apparently William Hung, the oft-mocked reject from American Idol, has now released an EP of covers called Inspiration available exclusively on iTunes (click here if you have the software installed and, god help you, you want to hear just how bad he sounds——and yes, it's every bit as awful as you think it would be). This is just so, so wrong.

But what's even more wrong is that his cover of Ricky Martin's "She Bangs", the song that he went down in flames performing on American Idol, is number 22 on the iTunes sales chart today. What is the matter with you people? This isn't funny anymore.

3.25.04
Like many of you, I was obsessed with the Gorillaz record when it first came out, but I always had this nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that it wouldn't hold up over time, that at some point in the not-too-distant future it would be seen as a jokey relic whose time had come and gone. If that's the case, however, it hasn't happened yet; I've been listening to it a lot in the last week, and it's still as captivating as ever——possibly even moreso that it was when it was released. The record was clearly a prelude to Blur mark III, which started its transformation on 13 and fully grew into its new sound on last year's Think Tank, but Gorillaz might be better than either of those records. If, like me, you stuck this one back on the shelf a couple of years ago and haven't listened to it since, dust it off and get it loaded onto your iPod forthwith. You won't be disappointed.

3.26.04
Remember that William Hung guy I wrote about a couple of days ago? Well, it gets worse: his cover of "She Bangs" went as high as number 4 on the iTunes sales chart yesteday, beating out chart-toppers like Britney Spears and the Black Eyed Peas. Please stop doing this, people. It was cute and kitschy for a while, but now you're just toying with him.

3.26.04
Another iTunes purchase, this time the theme to the Fox show Wonderfalls, "I Wonder Why the Wonderfalls" by Andy Partridge of XTC fame. It's not an especially great song——it's a little too cute for it's own good, even given Partridge's tendency to tilt towards being overly clever in his lyrics (but he's British, so he can get away with it). But it's perfect for the show (watch this before Fox cancels it, please——I've seen them kill off too many shows I love after sentencing them to the tv gulag of Friday nights). And it was definitely worth my 99 cents, especially because this means I won't have to buy the whole companion CD to the show should they ever decide to release one.

3.29.04
I picked up a few new records on Friday. I had only intended to buy two or so, but they had so many things on my wish list in stock (for once) that I ended up with five. My primary goal was to get Iron and Wine's just-released second album, Our Endless Numbered Days. (It's strange to me that Pitchfork hasn't reviewed this yet; I'm guessing this means they're arguing about how much it sucks compared to his debut, which they praised effusively, or fighting each other for the right to praise this album even more effusively than they did the last one. I think it's really good, but then I'm nowhere near as hip as those smug bastards.) Digging through the racks, I found a bunch of other stuff I've been looking for, including Xiu Xiu's Fabulous Muscles, Franz Ferdinand's eponymous new release, and the Liars' The Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top. I also couldn't resist the Walkmen's two year old release, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, because I've fallen so hard for their most recent effort, Bows and Arrows.

Most everything I purchased is really good. The Liars record is phenomenal, despite a 30 minute closing track that repeats the same bar of music over and over for about the last 23 minutes, and Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is just as amazing as the Walkmen disc I already own. Franz Ferdinand isn't bad, but I'm not sure if they're adding anything significant to the whole dancepunk/new wave revival thing or if they're the beginning of a glut of imitators that will spoil the movement before it really gets going the same way the Hives and the Vines put a damper on the promise of the Stokes. It could grow on me, though, because I've really been more in the mood for Iron and Wine-style gentle hauntings, which is probably why I've been listening to Our Endless Numbered Days more than the others (alongside the two Sufjan Stevens discs I recently acquired). Xiu Xiu is probably the most interesting of all the albums I bought——some of the stuff is really revolutionary, some of it just doesn't do it for me, and some of it I'm still on the fence about. But for the time being, I can't stop myself from listening to it, and I think that means I like it.

3.30.04
Only one more week til the new Modest Mouse, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, is unleashed on the world after a lengthy incubation period (it was finished and ready for release last September, but the band's record label deciding to hold it back until this spring). A couple of weeks ago, the band also unveiled a new web site where you can not only order the new record and listen to streaming samples from all tracks, you can also order a copy of their first official live album, surreally titled Baron von Bullshit Rides Again. I agonized for a couple of weeks about whether I should order the new album from the web site, because they have a deal where if you order both discs at the same time, not only do you get a discount, you also get the live album delivered to your mailbox a week ahead of schedule (it will be officially released on April 13, one week after Good News), but last night I finally bit the bullet and placed my order.

My only concern was that I'm not guaranteed to get the new album on April 6 (it says that all orders placed by March 31 "will be shipped for a scheduled delivery of on or around April 6 "), and given how long I've been waiting for this record already, I'm not sure that I can wait a single day more than I have to. But what I'm hoping is that they'll start shipping all the orders out on Thursday or Friday of this week, knowing that many of them will arrive before Tuesday, as kind of a reward for the diehard fans who ordered off the web site. I realize this is probably just wishful thinking, but since I've already made my choice, I'm trying to make it sound as positive as I can. I just hope I can resist the urge to visit the record store on Wednesday morning if I don't get the new record in the mail by Tuesday.

3.31.04
Iron and Wine. Our Endless Numbered Days. Get it now. Quit wasting time reading this site.