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august 2015

8.3.15
Jens Lekman, "Postcard #31":

A nice, short, upbeat little track that easily surpasses any of the tracks released in July. B-side material, but the kind of b-side that a fan would treasure.



8.4.15
The National's Matt Beringer is releasing a side project under the name El Vy. The album is called Return to the Moon, and here's the title track:

Purely because of Beringer's voice, it sounds something like the National, but this is a lot more upbeat (musically, anyway), than a typical National track, and the drums are also a lot less complex than the rhythms that National drummer Bryan Devendorf typically crafts. But I like this pretty well, and will definitely be giving this album a listen.



8.5.15
Another side project group today, this one featuring the lead singers from both Faith No More and TV on the Radio. They're calling themselves Nevermen, and they recently shared the track "Tough Towns":

I don't really care for this at all. The parts where Tunde Adembimpe sings what is the closest thing this track has to a chorus are intriguing, but there's too much down time and idle sections of this song. I'm not anticipating picking up the album when it comes out, but I'll keep an open mind if they share any other tracks.



8.6.15
If David Byrne were to re-record Rei Momo with a more modern production approach and faster tempos on most of the songs, it could be one of the best records of his post-Talking Heads career. As it is, it's hard for me to hear anything except what might have been when I listen to it these days.



8.7.15
Also: I know people who proclaim themselves to be true Talking Heads fans have a lot of fun dissing True Stories, the semi-soundtrack for a movie the David Byrne made with the same name, but it's a great, great album.

Even factoring for my standard first-purchased bias (the songs on this record were obviously not the first Talking Heads songs I'd ever heard, but True Stories was the first record of theirs I ever bought), there's nothing on here that doesn't deserve to stand next to the songs on Little Creatures, and it's certainly way better than the final Talking Heads album, Naked, where you could practically feel the band splitting apart and David Byrne going off to pursue his musical tangents in a solo career.



8.10.15
No new track from Jens Lekman this week, the first time he's missed a week in over 30 weeks since the start of this project in January. There's no explanation on his blog, which is a bit unusual, but I have to assume that he hasn't quit the project entirely and that he just missed a deadline.

In the beginning, I assumed that this would happen within a couple of months. Not that he'd abandon the project, but that it wouldn't be weekly for a lot of the year and we'd end up with 25-30 tracks at the end of 2015.

But once he reached the halfway mark with no skipped weeks, I thought he might actually make it the whole year and give us 52 new songs in 52 weeks, but now it looks like that's not going to happen.

Maybe this will be the aberration, and he'll go the rest of the year without missing another week. But in some ways, for an OCD completist like me, that might be even worse than him going to a more sporadic schedule for the remainder of 2015——it will always nag at me that he had just one little week in August that kept him from reaching his goal of releasing a new song a week for an entire year.



8.11.15
I haven't been to see any concerts since I saw Morrissey in June, and I don't have plans to see any the rest of the year. What I thought was going to be the year of the live show for me looks like it's turning into a very intense two months of shows with a couple of bookends in March and June. More like the quarter of live shows instead.

I am potentially intrigued by Sufjan Stevens coming to town in November, but I'm pretty sure I'm out of town for a conference when he's in Atlanta, so that likely won't happen. And I'd really, really like to see Titus Andronicus when they play the Masquerade next month, but there are still major parking issues at the Masquerade, and I'm not sure I'm going to be seeing another show there until they figure those out (one possibility is the new Ponce City Market, which has a huge parking garage and is just across the street from the Masquerade, but I don't know if it's open 24 hours and if it would be too expensive to park there for that purpose——it would be hard to justify paying $20 to see a concert that only cost me $15).

But other than that, I don't see any Atlanta shows on the horizon after a glut of them this spring.



8.12.15
Chvrches have shared another track from their upcoming album, Every Open Eye. This one is called "Never Ending Circles":

Classic Chvrches sound on this track, which comes off as a ballad thanks to the more minimalistic, less bombastic approach to the instrumentation. But with a few changes, this could have easily fit seamlessly on to their debut, and that's fine by me: I don't need a band that has staked a claim on a unique sound to try and become something entirely different on their sophomore release, and I'd be very happy if we got The Bones of What You Believe 2.0 from Every Open Eye.



8.13.15
Wavves have shared another song, "Heavy Metal Detox", from their upcoming album V:

Sort of a standard-issue Wavves track, which means it's pretty catchy and pretty likable.



8.14.15
Does it feel like forever since any new music has been released? It feels like forever since any new music has been released.



8.17.15
Jens Lekman, "Postcard #32":

This is a weird little orchestral disco throwaway. But at least it's relatively short.



8.18.15
Beirut have shared another song from their upcoming No No No, this one called "Gibraltar":

This one's a little weird. I'm not sure if I would like it if I didn't already like Beirut, but since I know it's Beirut and I can hear it as a nice little detour off their normal sound, I find myself really liking it in that context. Which seems wrong to me, but there you go.



8.19.15
I might be slowly coming around on Courtney Barnett. After continuing to listen to her debut, Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit, off and on for the past couple of months, I've now come to the point where I think she's someone I'd like to hang out with and whose career I would enthusiastically support as a friend.

Maybe after I spend a bit more time with the album I'll actually be able to like it for what it is instead of relying on an imaginary alternate reality friendship to see me through.



8.20.15
Patti Smith has recorded an original song for the series finale of Cartoon Network's long-running Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and it's kind of awesome:

What a perfectly oddball way for this oddball show to end its run. I would love to hear the story on how this came to be, because odds are that it's even weirder than what I'm imagining.



8.21.15
Public Image Ltd. have a new album coming out, What the World Needs Now..., and they have shared the first single, "Double Trouble":

I stopped listening to PiL in the late 80s, but their generic Album/Casette/CD remains one of my favorite records from that time, and its also easily the best thing that John Lydon has ever done musically. I was actually unaware that they had released anything after 1987's Happy?, but they apparently recorded a couple more albums during the grunge era of the early 90s and also released another album a few years ago in 2012.

I'm happy John Lydon is out in the world, doing his thing, and in theory I'm pleased that he's still making music with PiL. I'm not sure this song has convinced me to buy the new record yet, but I'm definitely going to give it a listen and see if there's enough about what I loved about the band 30 years ago to make me want to spend time with some newer songs.



8.24.15
Jens Lekman, "Postcard #33":

Disco doo wop, thanks to a combination of samples from the Nutmegs and Jens' drum machine and synthesizer. But I kinda like it.



8.25.15
For a while I thought I didn't really like Panda Bear's Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, but now I think I like Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, I just don't like any of the individual songs on Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper. If that can possibly make any kind of sense.



8.26.15
There's nothing I want more than for Titus Andronicus' The Most Lamentable Tragedy to be the best album released this year, but it's just not. I don't know if it's that the album as a whole is too long, if some of the songs themselves are too long (although as I revisit the tracklist, there are actually only a couple of songs that go over the five minute mark, so it's not a good sign that it feels like a lot more of them do——plus some of my favorite songs on their other records are ones that go well past that mark), or there aren't enough amazing songs to carry some of the other good-but-not-amazing ones.

"Fatal Flaw" might be the best single they've ever released (not the best song, but the best single in terms of catchiness, brevity, sing-along qualities, etc.), and there are some other strong efforts on the two album set as well. But despite the grand ambition on display, this feels much more like Local Business, the immediate predecessor to Tragedy and their least ambitious effort (in terms of an overarching concept/album-long narrative arc), and not very much like The Monitor, which remains their masterwork.

The most curious addition is a cover (an admittedly pretty generic punk cover) of a Pogues song, "A Pair of Brown Eyes". First, because covering a classic Pogues ballad stripped of its nuance and turning it into a barreling hotrod of a track is a bad idea, and second because I thought frontman Patrick Stickles was super-pissed at this band after touring with them a few years back and complaining publicly about getting dissed by them on a nightly basis.

It's one of the weakest tracks on the record, and I can't tell if this was his way of offering an olive branch to the Pogues and he just didn't execute it very well, or if he did this as a further slap at them, because anyone hearing the Titus Andronicus version of this song who doesn't already know about the Pogues is unlikely to seek out the Pogues for further exploration.



8.27.15
When I first listened to Wilco's surprise free album Star Wars, I thought it was about par for the course for the band over the last decade: a couple of pretty decent songs, a lot of stuff that was middling but not terrible, and a couple of songs I could do without.

But I've found myself listening to the record far more often than I would have guessed, and now I think this might be their best record since A Ghost Is Born, which was their last truly great album (it's a close tie with Sky Blue Sky, which had some nice moments as well, but the higher energy level on Star Wars might move it slightly ahead).


"Random Name Generator" is my favorite song, both musically and because it contains the best lines on the album, delivered with a kind of mischievous indifference that makes you really wonder whether Tweedy is kidding or not:

I kinda like it when I make you cry
A miracle only once in a while

Star Wars overall is not anywhere near the consistent quality of the trilogy of records that made their career——Summerteeth, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and A Ghost Is Born——but the I-don't-give-a-fuck attitude seems to have really worked for them here——this album doesn't seem nearly as overwrought and earnestly purposeful as their last couple of releases, Wilco (The Album) and The Whole Love.

Maybe Jeff Tweedy has become less uptight after making the loose, shambling record with his son (last year's Sukierae), or maybe he's finally been able to get over the unrealistic expectations from fans and critics that came with that trilogy of great records, but whatever's driving this new approach, it's working.



8.28.15
Siouxsie Sioux has recorded her first track in 8 years, specifically for the season 3 finale for NBC's Hannibal:

I happen to love this show (although I have yet to watch any of season 3——I'm saving it for a special binge), and I think it's pretty cool that Siouxsie is a big enough fan as well that she wrote a song and returned to the studio because she likes the show so much herself.

I haven't heard the song in the context of the show, but it feels like it would fit perfectly with the vibe they've established——as a fan, I can almost visualize the sequence that this will go over, presumably towards the end of the final episode of the year (and possibly the final episode period).

I'm not sure how much I would like this song outside of the Hannibal context, but I very much appreciate it in that framework, and it's also nice to hear that, despite the long layoff from writing and recording, Siouxsie can still produce a very recognizable song in her style——this wouldn't have been out of place on any of her 90s records, and you could make an argument for it fitting on Tinderbox, which remains my favorite of her releases.



8.31.15
Jens Lekman, "Postcard #34":

This is a sweet little a capella song that's a blatant plea to donate to the JustGiving page of Carey Lander, the keyboardist from Camera Obscura who has been battling a rare form of cancer for the past few years. It's a nice melody that may at some point be repurposed for a real Jens song. But right now he wants to use it to get this message out, so follow the link above and support this charity if you feel so inclined.