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june 2006

6.1.06
So iTunes posted their summer playlist this week, and it's pretty awful. Now I'm motivated to dig into my collection and create a competing version with actual good music, not just easy, overused cliches or randomly inserted songs that don't fit into a summer mix which are there just to make you think the person who made the list has really esoteric tastes.

Of course, eight months ago I was really motivated to do one new mixtape every two months, and we've seen how well that's been going...


6.2.06
I've watched five minutes of MTV's new Cheyenne reality show about an up-and-coming fifteen year old singer-songwriter, so let me give you the synopsis so you never have to go through that little hallway of hell yourself: imagine a 35 year old man writing a fake blog in the voice of a 15 year old girl, one that might fool other 35 year old men but which wouldn't fool actual 15 year olds for more than two sentences. Now imagine that you're given a choice between reading this blog every day for a month or watching five minutes of this show, and believe me when I tell you that, if you had already watched five minutes of this show, you'd choose the blog in a nanosecond.


6.12.06
I feel like I've barely listened to any music at all in the last week, even though I had the iPod going pretty much every time I was in the car for more than 5 minutes (including the entire time there and back on the 8 hour drive to get to and from our vacation spot). Wonder what that's about...


6.13.06
Alright, I know I've been bad about writing the notes for my year mixtape series, but I promise I'll resume work on the 1988 mixtape this week. Time to buckle down and get this puppy done so we can move on to 1989.


6.14.06

Mixtape: 1988

Track 2
"Chinese Bones"
Globe of Frogs
Robyn Hitchcock

While I would eventually go on to own almost everything in Robyn Hitchcock's extensive catalog (Gotta Let This Hen Out! and Groovy Decoy, along with a couple of the Soft Boys records, are the only widely available releases I'm missing at this point), Globe of Frogs was my first introduction to the man, and I almost didn't buy it because 1) I don't generally trust guys named "Robyn" and 2) especially when they spell it with a "y". Back in my high school years, when funds were limited and you could never buy everything you wanted to hear, it didn't take much more than that to bump someone off the purchase list.

Luckily, I didn't let my distaste for foppery get in the way (I let him slide because he was English, and, well, there's some foppery to be expected from the inhabitants of that peculiar isle), and it's a good thing, too——not only is Robyn one of my favorite artists, Globe of Frogs just happens to be one of his two best albums, along with Moss Elixir.

As is usual on a great Hitchcock album, the songs vary widely in tone and style, and also as is usual, oblique non-sequitors abound. "Chinese Bones" is a quiet, shimmering tune with lyrics that don't follow any kind of linear narrative path no matter how much you try to read into them, but it contains one of the best lines Robyn has ever written: "Something Shakespeare never said was, 'You've got to be kidding.'"

I don't know how that line sounds to anyone else, but it just kills me every time I hear it. Truth comes in many strange forms, and Robyn seems to have a special knack for dispensing it in easily digestible but slightly bizarre couplets.


6.15.06
A large part of the reason it has taken me so long to get to the notes for the 1998 mixtape are because of the next band in the sequence, the Pogues. When I first made this mix, I already had some notes in mind for this band, but my perspective on them changed after seeing them live in March, reuniting and playing in the US for the first time in 15 years.

And as you can see, they're still holding me up...


6.16.06
Petra Haden is one of three triplets? And one of her sisters is married to Jack Black? What a strange little world we live in...


6.19.06
So I guess there's still the solo Thom Yorke record to look forward to, along with (theoretically) two solo release from the Fiery Furnaces' Matt Friedberger. But man, new releases have been coming in at a trickle for the past month or so, and things don't look like they're going to improve any time soon.


6.20.06
Last week, Entertainment Weekly got into the Chili Peppers/Tom Petty controversy (which says that the Peppers' new single, "Dali California" bears some striking similarities to Petty's "Last Dance with Mary Jane") by comparing a few other recent releases with older songs.

One of their comparisons pitted Love and Rockets' "No New Tale to Tell" against the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' recently released "Gold Lion". I didn't think the comparison was valid when I was reading the article, but now every time I hear "Gold Lion" I can't fucking stop thinking about "No New Tale". Thanks a lot, you bastards.


6.21.06
Sonic Youth's new record, Rather Ripped, is available on iTunes, but there it's called Rather Ripped (iTunes Version). They unhelpfully don't specify what's different about this version and the version I could buy on CD, but since there's a single track at the end that is only available if I buy the whole album on iTunes, I'm going to assume that it's a bonus track and that's what makes this the iTunes version.

Aside from the fact that this practice annoys me greatly and makes me less, not more, likely to buy a whole album from iTunes (among other reasons, of course), the track, entitled "Helen Lundeberg" sounds like one of those Sonic Youth songs that purposely overuses feedback and other annoying noise/sounds (even though that's kind of what they're adored for by the critics, the band has actually done a fairly good job of avoiding these kinds of tracks on their last two records). So as usual, it will be a trip to the record store to pick this one up for me.


6.22.06
You know it's a slow time for new releases when the best even Pitchfork can do is to review obscure compilations and best-ofs and dreck like the New Cars, featuring Todd Rungren in place of the Cars' real singer, Ric Ocasek.


6.23.06
The iPod was in a Dinosaur Jr. kind of mood yesterday morning, specifically a Green Mind kind of Dinosaur Jr. mood. Which is normally a pretty good mood to be in, but those songs, mixed with a couple of Rage Against the Machine tracks, were hardly what I needed while driving in maddening rush hour traffic on the beltway on my way to a day wasted in training that didn't train me how to do anything I didn't already know how to do years ago.


6.26.06
Fans of the Home Movies animated show that aired mostly on the Cartoon Network (after a very brief stint on network television) almost invariably cite "Director's Cut" as one of their favorite episodes. The main plot element of this episode is the shooting of a rock opera based on Franz Kafka's "Metamorphasis", and the song snippets from this production are as catchy as anything. Way back when I first saw this episode, I poked around the web trying to find MP3's for this show, but came away empty-handed.

Seeing the episode on DVD recently prompted me to look again, and lo and behold, not only are they out there, they're actually available from the web site of the show creator, Brendon Small, in their original recorded state, free from the show dialogue, etc., that mix with them in the actual episode.

This song, "Turning Into a Bug", was good enough that I added it to my iTunes/iPod after downloading it, but the real gem is "Living Like a Bug". Download this song and see if you can get it out of your head for the next week.


6.27.06
Sleater-Kinney are sadly calling it quits. It would be one thing if they had started to lose their edge, but their most recent album, The Woods, was one of their strongest outings to date, and it confirmed that after seven albums, they still had plenty left to say and plenty of new ground to cover.

You can read their announcement of the split here.


6.28.06
I'm so desperate for some kind of new music to buy that I'm seriously considering Belle & Sebastian's White Collar Boy EP, which was just made available on iTunes this week. But only one of the new tracks appeals to me on first listen, and I'm just not that much of a Belle & Sebastian nut, so I'll probably hold off. At least if I do decide to buy it I won't be forced into buying the single that I already have from buying the record; if this were one of those all-or-nothing EPs that some bands are fond of selling on iTunes, I wouldn't even consider it.

Oh, and speaking of empty fluff on iTunes, is there really a need for SEVEN mixes of Paris Hilton's first single? I guess she and her handlers are just hoping if they throw enough remixed shit at the danceclub walls, some version of it is going to stick.


6.29.06
I don't remember June sucking this bad for new releases before this year. There's always been a little bit of a slowdown in the summer because most bands release their new stuff before the summer touring season, but this past month or so has pretty much been a wasteland.


6.30.06
Finally, something to look foward to: new Modest Mouse and Sparklehorse records due out sometime before the end of the year. Let's just hope the releases pick up and I can find some new stuff worth listening to until then.