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april 2011

4.1.11
Been stuck on listening to the part of my CD collection from the 90s recently. In terms of plays in iTunes, this is easily the least-listened to portion of my collection, because when I starting listening to my music as digital files in the early 2000s, I was familiar enough with the 90s that I didn't spend much time re-listening to it, unlike the 80s, which I started listening to heavily again after converting that music to digital format.

I wonder if that will be the last decade to really have a specific sound that dominated most of it like grunge did. We've got a full decade of this new century under our belts already, and I don't have a clue as to which band or limited set of bands I could point to as defining the sound of that decade. I'm not even sure signature artists exist within many of the genres——sure, there are the artists who were the most successful in a given genre, some of whom are downright brilliant in their originality, but I can't think of any offhand who inspired legions of imitators like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, et al.



4.4.11
I own Radiohead's second album, The Bends, but I got it used and I've never really listened to it. I'm gonna fix that soon.



4.5.11
I still haven't brought myself to order the Pains of Being Pure at Heart's second album, Belong. But I know I will. I just hope the inevitable initial charm sticks around longer than it did on their debut.



4.6.11
Not necessarily music-related, but my friend Sliced Tongue has written one of the most beautiful blog entries I've ever read. Go have a look.



4.7.11
I know this is regional bias, but the Pressure Boys have got to be the best local band never to break through to a national audience.



4.8.11
Bought tickets for the Echo & the Bunnymen show at the 9:30 Club where they'll play their first two albums, Crocodiles and Heaven Up Here, in full. I would have preferred Porcupine and Ocean Rain, but maybe if this tour goes well we'll get that in a couple of years.



4.11.11
Getting mixed vibes on Panda Bear's Tomboy. I love his solo stuff and his work with Animal Collective from the past few years, but I think I'm going to wait until this one is released so I can listen to samples from the whole album before I make a decision about buying it.



4.12.11
New record from the Feelies? That's unpossible!



4.13.11
Got some CDs from Amazon yesterday: TV on the Radio's Nine Types of Light, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart's Belong, and ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead's Tao of the Dead.

I've gone back and forth on Trail of Dead over the years. I didn't buy their last record, The Century of Self, and it took many listens to the samples from Tao of the Dead over several weeks before I convinced myself to give it a shot. And then, as soon as I ripped it into iTunes, I immediately developed bad feelings towards it. Not because of the music, though, but because the band irritatingly put the entire album into one long track on the CD (although of course it's sold as separate tracks on iTunes). So instead of being able to listen to it right away, I had to take the ripped track into a sound editing program and figure out where the song breaks were (using the iTunes store tracks as a guide), and then import the new tracks back into iTunes and add all the metadata.

Very, very annoying, and not at all the experience I needed to get me back on track with the band.



4.14.11
I really like the new Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Belong, but I'm only hearing the 90s references that are so prevalent in all the reviews on a couple of songs. In general, it sounds cleaner and sharper than their debut, but it still has that same sound.

I'd like to think that a few weeks from now I'll still like it as much as I do now, but I like their first one a whole lot for a short time, too, before I soured on it a bit. I still think the debut is a solid if derivative effort, and there are songs that are undeniably great, but overall my estimation of it fell the longer I spent with it.



4.15.11
As much of a pain in the ass as it was to get the CD rip in listenable form, I've got to say that after my first few listens, Trail of Dead's Tao of the Dead is the strongest, most consistent, and most listenable effort since their masterpiece, 2001's Source Tags and Codes. Tao sounds like the real follow-up to that album, the one they've been trying unsuccessfully to make for the past decade.

We'll see how it wears after a couple of months, but so far it's a keeper.



4.18.11
I'm also really liking TV on the Radio's Nine Types of Light. It continues the laid back vibe of Dear Science (I still wish they had left the trailing comma that was included in the original title), which is certainly different than their early stuff, but if this is the way a band as complex as this matures, I'll take it.

The opener, "Second Song", is the strongest of the set, and stands among the best of their career. The opening vocal doesn't sound at all like them——instead it sounds as if the singer from the National wandered into the studio for a few bars (but that's not a bad thing). The track has a lot of fits and starts, and slides from one song fragment to another, but it all fits together, and the ideas circle back on themselves to meet in harmony.

It reminds me very much of Wilco's "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" in that it is different than anything they've done before but also so obviously the next step in their development, and it sets the tone for the rest of the record while still somehow standing apart from the songs that follow it.



4.19.11
Radiohead just did something cool: they made the two tracks they released for Record Store Day available for download for free to anyone who used their web site to purchase their latest record, The King of Limbs. The tracks are called "Supercollider" and "The Butcher", and they were recorded during the same sessions as The King of Limbs.

They're not significantly better or worse than most of the material on that album——they easily could have used these tracks to release a 10-song record. And even though that might have made sense, it's nice that they're giving them to people who have already purchased the album proper instead of making people hunt down the relatively rare copies of the Record Store Day physical release.



4.20.11
So. Animal Collective is going to headline a show this summer at Merriweather Post Pavillion, a show that fans have been dreaming about since the band named their last album after the venue. Here's the sucky part: it's happening on a day when I'm supposed to be in another state.

I haven't been in a while——I think two years ago when I took my wife to see the Decemberists for our anniversary was the last time we went to a show. But I love, love, love that venue, especially for laid back bands in the summertime. I'm trying to talk her into going to another Decemberists show in June and taking our son with us for his first concert (we would sit on the lawn, far from the speakers and under the stars), and I would absolutely want to take him to this show as well. But I guess it's just one of those things that's not meant to be.



4.21.11
Sudden urge to run through the Beta Band catalog again after hearing "Broke" in a random shuffle playlist. There's a lot of middling tracks to get through, most of which become more middling because they last about twice as long as they should, but man, when they get a good pitch to hit, they knock it out of the park.



4.22.11
Some interesting variety in this month's $5 Amazon MP3 album downloads, a mixture of classics and new records that are on their way to becoming classics. The must-haves are Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, of Montreal's Skeletal Lamping, Kid Cudi's Man on the Moon, Big Star's #1 Record/Radio City (which is really two great albums for $2.50 each), the Radio Dept.'s Clinging to a Scheme, and Thao's Know Better Learn Faster.

Some other records I like but wouldn't quite put in the must-have category are PJ Harvey's Let England Shake (her best work in years), Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger, and Ted Leo's Shake the Sheets.

As for records I'm considering buying, there's Sigur Ros' Takk, Common's Be, Lucinda William's Little Honey, and Mos Def's Black on Both Sides. Sigur Ros is the most likely purchase; I'll decide on the others after listening to clips from the records a couple of times.



4.25.11
I've been working my way back through the two Beastie Boys albums I own (Check Your Head and Ill Communication) to see if I can convince myself one way or the other about whether to buy Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2, which comes out next week.

There's a bunch of stuff I like on Check Your Head, and "Sabotage" is still amazing despite its pop culture ubiquity, but so far I'm leaning towards a "no" on the new record, at least not until I've been able to hear some tracks from it.



4.25.11
New 50 Foot Wave track, "Grey", from their upcoming album now available for download here. I've listened a few times now, and I'm liking this one more than the first track they released, "Radiant Addict" (although I thought "Radiant Addict" was pretty decent).

Also: "grey" is the proper way to spell that color. It's not the British way, it's the right way, and I always feel a special kinship with other Americans who ignore the spelling with an "a" and stick to the "e".



4.26.11
I have a friend in Athens, GA, who is aware of my of Montreal obsession, and when we talked last week, she told me that one of her friends has a five year old who is in Alabee's class. And when that girl had a birthday party, which my friend, Alabee and her mom ("Nina", I reminded her) were in attendance, and the Barnes' gift to this girl was a piece of custom art from Nina that depicted the girl herself.

I'm moderately less obsessed with of Montreal than I was a year or two ago, but their still my favorite contemporary group, and if I had been asked, I would have driven all the way down to Georgia to be my friend's date for a five year old's birthday party.



4.27.11
A couple new CDs arrived yesterday: Panda Bear's Tomboy and the Feelies' Here Before. I think they're both going to be decent records, but I'm not expecting either one to knock my socks off. I am really looking forward to hearing some new Feelies tracks, though.



4.28.11
I've had Cornershop's first record in a long time, Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast, on my Amazon Save for Later list for months now, and I've never been able to pull the trigger. But when they released a new album, Cornershop and the Double-O Groove Of to rave reviews, I was ready to pick it up.

That is, until I listened to some song samples. The music itself was pretty catchy and focused ethnic pop, but Tjinder Singh's vocals have been replaced by the singing of the too-aptly named Bubbley Kaur, and it just doeesn't work for me. The fact that the lyrics are entirely in Punjabi doesn't bother me at all, but her voice makes the music sound too much like an Indian pop group trying desperately to break through to a western audience. The music still sounds mostly like Cornershop, but Singh's vocals make all the difference, and with Kaur singing, it's just not a Cornershop record to me.



4.29.11
While reading the most recent updates on one of my favorite web sites, passiveaggresivenotes.com, I came across a link to a live webcam positioned outside the famed Abbey Road studios in London, where the Beatles recorded many of their albums and where they were photographed for the Abbey Road album cover.

The webcam allows you to watch that road crossing live, and it's absolutely fascinating how any people try to recreate that album cover for themselves——the first time I tuned in when it was the middle of the day in London, it took fewer than five minutes before I saw a group of four young men repeatedly crossing the road in lockstep while one of their friends stood in the road trying to recreate that album cover.

Those groups of four are fairly rare, but watch for 10 minutes during daytime hours and you're almost guaranteed to see someone posing there. It's oddly addicting; I end up watching it for 10-20 minutes every day.