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december 2003
12.1.03
I don't care how cool the ad campaign is, it's just wrong to use the Cure's "Pictures of You" to sell stuff. |
12.1.03
I've had Jim Croce's "Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)" running through my head for days. Not being a fan of this song in particular or Jim Croce in general, I'm starting find this a little disturbing. |
12.2.03
I'd like to say thank you to the dozen or so people who did Google searches on "morphine like swimming" over the past month. I kept seeing that phrase show up in the server logs day after day, and eventually I couldn't resist the impulse to put Morphine's Like Swimming in the rotation this week (I did a review of this album on Plug a few years back, and it apparently ranks pretty high on the search results). It's not their best overall effort (that would still have to be the brilliant Cure for Pain), but it contains some of their best songs, including "Potion" and "I Know You", which I first heard emanating thunderously from the doors of a club where the band was playing while waiting to get my hand stamped. That was a brilliant way to get introduced to that song, and I still feel the bass rumbling in my chest every time I hear it. |
12.3.03
At work today, I was mostly listening to the Beautiful South's debut, Welcome to the Beautiful South. This band sprouted from the corpse of the Housemartins, and it didn't really stray to far from the style of that band: terribly clever, sardonic lyrics, Paul Heaton's falsetto voice, and a very sweet English guitar pop sound that nestles somewhere between the Smiths and the Woodentops (although it's far less sophisticated than either of those bands). Norman Cook, Heaton's creative competition in the Housemartins, went on to become a bigger success and a club darling under the moniker Fatboy Slim, but for a while it seemed like the Beautiful South were better off without him, producing three fairly strong records before suffering a major drop-off in creativity (at the end there, they sounded a lot more like the overly sincere and sappy Simply Red than the blisteringly sarcastic Housemartins). Welcome to the Beautiful South still holds up really well, though, even better than the Housemartins' records, and it was perfect for a stressful day at work: the music is deceptively soothing, masking the bitterness of lyrics decrying the idiocy of the world.
On the way home, I listened to Lucinda Williams' Essence, her critically well-received follow up to the brilliant Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. I never really got into Essence, and I'm sorry to say that I'm still not really into it. The first couple of tracks are fairly strong, but after that it all seemed to blend together into a kind of nebulous midtempo haze. I might give it another go on the headphones just to make sure I'm not missing anything, but I have a feeling that it's going to be a long time before this one comes off the shelf again. |
12.4.03
With our first snow/sleet/ice storm of the season looming, I've selected some good winter records for your listening pleasure:
- Death Cab for Cutie——The Photo Album
R.E.M.——Automatic for the People
Bright Eyes——Letting Off the Happiness
Wilco——Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Yo La Tengo——And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Radiohead——OK Computer
Beck——Sea Change
U2——The Unforgettable Fire
Sigur Ros——Agaetis Byrjun
Modest Mouse——The Moon and Antartica
Eels——Electro-Shock Blues
The Good Life——Black Out
There are others, of course, but those are the ones that lept immediately to mind.
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12.5.03
I don't think I've stepped into a single restaurant or retail store since last Friday where I haven't been bombarded with Christmas music ranging from tasteful orchestral arrangements (slightly annoying) to too-clever-by-half "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" types of songs (beyond irritating). Can't we all just chill out about the holiday thing a little? I mean, hell, no wonder everyone's so cranky by Christmas day. |
12.8.03
A couple of months ago, I got my friend and former boss Jeff a $40 gift certificate to the local independent music store for his 40th birthday. Here's what he ended up getting with it:
Finally got to Record & Tape Traders a few weeks ago. Here's what you bought me:
- Radiohead——Hail to the Thief: I've been wanting to get this one since it came out.
- Eels——Beautiful Freak: I bought Shootenanny! used a few months ago. Been looking for this one.
- Weezer——Maladroit: Know you're not a big Weezer fan, but I really enjoyed the Green Album.
- White Stripes——White Blood Cells: I own Elephant and like it, but "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" always takes me back to my first time listening to the Pixies, so I want to give the rest of the album a try.
- U2——Pop: This is probably the only U2 album that I had no interest in buying or listening to. Times have changed and for $6 I'm willing to take the leap.
Those are some pretty good choices, I think. I actually own all of those myself, except for Pop (I, too, am waiting for the $6 bargain bin opportunity), and I like all of them, even the Weezer (Jeff's right though——I'm not a huge Weezer fan, although I own the Green Album and Maladroit). Hail to the Thief has its moments, and it's certainly gotten stronger the more I've listened to it, but it's still not on par with OK Computer, Kid A, or Amnesiac. Beautiful Freak is much, much better than Shootenanny! (Eels albums decrease in quality the farther they get from Electro-Shock Blues, and Shootenanny!, being their most recent, is as far as you can currently get——"My Beloved Monster" and "Novocaine for the Soul" are head and shoulders above anything on Shootenanny!). And White Blood Cells I like a lot, too, despite the backlash that the White Stripes have generated in the Serious Music Critic circles with their recent success.
But the music's not for me, it's for Jeff, so it doesn't really matter what I think. I am secretly glad that he picked out good stuff, though.
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12.9.03
Is it a bad sign that all I want to listen to at work is the Cure and we've only just begun to enter the most stressful part of the year? And not the pop-oriented, Head on the Door, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me stuff either——more along the lines of The Top, Seventeen Seconds, and Pornography. So, no, I'm not feeling very optimistic at work these days. |
12.10.03
No matter how many times I see it, Pitchfork's final entry on their release dates page cracks me up:
December 18th, 2036
Guns N' Roses: Chinese Democracy
(Universal Time Warner)
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12.11.03
I'm in the mood for something new, not just new music from a band I already like or even a new band in one of the genres that I'm already familiar with, but something entirely new to me. Maybe it's time for me to give underground electronica a try. Or classical. Or death metal. Something. I'm feeling bored with everything in my collection today. |
12.12.03
In response to my post yesterday, my friend Jeff (not the guy who I gave the gift certificate to, but another friend and onetime coworker) suggested trip hop, specifically Tricky and Massive Attack. I haven't listened to either of these groups (Yo La Tengo did a cover of "Be Thankful for What You've Got", which was famously covered by Massive Attack on Blue Lines), although I know Tom likes (or at least used to like) a lot of this stuff. Of the other groups listed as trip hop on All Music Guide, I own a lot of Beth Orton (love the first couple of outings, but she's really gotten very bland recently) and Beta Band, but not much else (I also own Portishead NYC Live, but I'm not that into it). But I'm willing to give it a shot; I might try to pick up Blue Lines or Mezzanine next time I'm in a record store, and if those do something for me, get recommendations from Tom on where to go after that. |
12.15.03
Friday on the way to lunch, I stopped into the record store and picked up Massive Attack's Mezzanine, recently recommended to me by Jeff. I like it pretty well, although the first four tracks are clearly the best of the bunch. The rest of it meanders a little too much for my taste, but it's still a good record to put on the headphones at work when I need to focus on something. It's nice and dark, too, which goes well with my mood at the office recently.
I also picked up In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, a record that I was almost guaranteed to love, having both influenced Conor Oberst's recent forays into indie orchestral pop with Bright Eyes and Colin Meloy's Decemberists, who are emerging as two of the most important bands of the next two years (provided they don't pull a disappearing act like Neutral Milk Hotel frontman Jeff Mangum——after the success of In the Aeroplane, he pretty much vanished from the music scene). It really is a stunning work, well worthy of the heaping amounts of praised that the critics have piled onto it since its release five years ago. |
12.16.03
Ugh. Saw the video for "The New Year", which is apparently what Death Cab for Cutie has unwisely chosen as the first single from their new album Transatlanticism. It was disjointed, fragmented, poorly shot, and utterly without a discernible story. It held no emotional resonance, and its pointlessness made the song itself seem much worse than it actually is. Worst video ever. |
12.17.03
There's a really evil-looking bug on the cover of Massive Attack's Mezzanine that fits perfectly with the music but which does not go well at all with the bright orange color of CD itself. |
12.18.03
I'm so tired, I haven't slept a wink... |
12.19.03
You know, I'm constantly praising Sleater-Kinney's The Hot Rock, but it's easy to forget how close to perfect their breakout record, Dig Me Out, was. If you're a fan but you haven't listened to that record in a while, you should really dust it off and give it a spin. It roars with the same intensity it did six years ago. Even the single, "Dance Song '97", which I initially hated (that's why I resisted buying Dig for so long), is sounding really good to me. |
12.30.03
I got a 40 gig iPod for Christmas. This changes everything... |
12.31.03
Our Christmas travels to North Carolina provided me with a good opportunity to scour new record stores for some long-sought items that I haven't been able to find locally. High on my list: The Unicorns' Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? and Sufjan Stevens' Greetings from Michigan.
My first stop was Schoolkids Records in Chapel Hill, an independent store that is as much a part of the music scene there as the famous Cat's Cradle club. They had the Unicorns, but no Sufjan (although they at least had an empty slot for him in the racks). I also picked up the Decemberists' Her Majesty the Decemberists and the Postal Service's Give Up as part of my gift to my sister Tori.
Next, in Wilmington, I dropped by a little independent store in the downtown waterfront area called CD Alley. They didn't have Sufjan, either (not even a place for him in the racks), but I did find Spoon's Girls Can Tell and I also got two more for Tori: Rufus Wainwright's Poses and Badly Drawn Boy's About a Boy. They also had a Modest Mouse live bootleg on CD, but it only had 11 songs on it and was priced at $30, so I didn't bite.
So still no Sufjan, but a couple of good finds, and some good stuff for my sister. I'm just going to have to break down and order Michigan online. |
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