Category: Music

The Best Albums of 2012 (So Far)

A Finely Crafted Long-Player

record-playerI feel like my music collection is stuck in a bit of a rut lately. Nothing I’ve got on the ‘Pod is really catching my fancy and requiring constant listening and re-listening. The only real exception is Black and White Town by Doves, which is an absolutely fantastic song, but I am very much an album listener. I love nothing more than the ebb and flow of a finely crafted long-player. Don’t get me wrong – some great music has been released this year, but all of the albums I have on hand are feeling a bit stale. Any good recommendations?

A Belated Best Of

Floral HeadphonesIt’s a bit late, but I’ve decided to finally throw together my “best albums of 2008” list. I spent too long thinking about it, and then spent some time procrastinating after that, and now it’s March of 2009 and I feel a bit silly. To make up for that, I’ve dug up representative videos for each album, some of them offical and some of them fan made (but interesting). All of these albums are still in heavy rotation on my iPod. 2008 was a good year for music.

2008 was also a good year for buying music on Amazon Mp3, which has become my digital music destination of choice simply because of the daily deals they have. For example, the newest Lily Allen album was $3.99 on the day it came out. I’ve also bought several pretty great albums for $1.99 a pop when they were on sale. Everything in the list below is available on the site, and a decent number of the albums are less than $10 to purchase.

My list and a collection of music videos follows after the jump…

Continue reading “A Belated Best Of”

Marked By Ash

There are a number of cool “mix tape” creator websites out there now. The notable few I’ve run across are muxtape.com, mixwit.com, and imeem.com. They’ve all got their own individual strengths… Muxtape works with iPhones, for example, but it seems like iMeem has the best selection, and Mixwit has the most customizable look and feel.

In any case, I’ve thrown together a playlist. The Jim O’Rourke and Pernice Brothers songs were the main inspiration for this mix – I built the rest around that general sound and lyrical tone. Enjoy!

EDIT: A downside of iMeem, apparently, is that some of the songs are shortened to 30 seconds when the playlist is embedded. If you click on the “standalone player” option, or go directly to the page on iMeem… you get the full version. How on earth does that make any sense? Suddenly less impressed with this toy.


Goodbye, Weekend / Have Some Music Videos

I spent most of this weekend a) trying to keep theleetworld.com from melting after the site made it to the front page of digg (and a bunch of other huge sites) and b) looking at places to live.

For right now, the site seems to have stopped melting, and as for places to live, Tim and I came up with a good top 5 list. Roommate #3, Trey, hasn’t had a chance to look at the places yet, but if he doesn’t manage to do it tomorrow, he’s just going to have to trust us, because we need to get our applications in pronto.

Other than that, I’d like to share the following two music videos I just came across:

Goldfrapp – A&E

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds – Dig, Lazarus, Dig!

Other Great Albums of 2007 (A Few Late Additions)

After reading through the various year-end lists, I tracked down a few of the interesting-sounding albums I hadn’t had a chance to listen to yet, and I discovered a few gems that I’d like to recommend as a sort of coda to my top 10 list:

Iron And Wine - The Shepherd's Dog

1) Iron and Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog

The Iron and Wine cover of “Dark Eyes” from the I’m Not There soundtrack is one of the standout songs on that album, so I decided to give Iron and Wine another listen-to, despite the fact that their Postal Service cover from the Garden State soundtrack was a bit mopey. This album is uniformly great, and if I had started listening to it earlier in the year, it would easily have been in my top 10 list. Rootsy, organic, full of beautiful harmonies and melodies, and highly recommended.

Battles - Mirrored2) Battles – Mirrored

My first exposure to this album was the video for Atlas, which I saw on Subterranean, i.e. the one hour a week (including 20 minutes of commercials) when M2 plays interesting music videos. The video is fairly minimal – just a shot of the band playing in the odd glass cube pictured on their album cover – but it fits the music, which is (mostly) instrumental rock, most of which is also very minimal, and generally composed of repeated percussion and industrial sounds. I’ve been drawn to more and more instrumental music in the past year or so, just because I find it hard to listen to vocal music when I’m reading (even though this was not an issue in my younger years when I had more brain cells…) Anyways, this one has really grown on me, much like similar music by Liquid Liquid did a few years back. “Atlas” and “Race: In” are the standout tracks here, although the band’s sound is a bit abrasive and may not be to everyone’s tastes.

LCD Soundsystem - 45:333) LCD Soundsystem – 45:33

This is actually a re-issue of an iTunes exclusive in a CD form. The new version splits up the formerly 45 minute first track into six parts (essentially the “movements” of the song) and adds on three bonus tracks (two b-sides and a remix). As you might imagine from my top 10 list, I’ve become a huge fan of LCD Soundsystem thanks to their second album. Much like the Battles album, this is primarily instrumental music (kind of a departure for the band), and I actually prefer it for reading because it’s a bit more soothing whereas the Battles album is more up-beat and rock-and-roll. Maybe I’ll use it for walking music when it isn’t so cold outside…

My Favorite Albums of 2007

Alright, in order for an album to end up on this list, it had to be an album that I find myself listening to regularly, even though time may have passed since it was released. I have several pretty great albums on my iPod that will end up on other end-of-the-year lists that haven’t quite grabbed me like the ten below.

This list isn’t perfect, of course, especially because I also limited myself to albums released in 2007. I guess including The Beatles album is kind of fudging things a bit, but it was a pretty amazing compilation that totally redefines what you can do instead of a vanilla “greatest hits” album.

1. Radiohead – In Rainbows
2. LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver
3. Various Artists – I’m Not There (Soundtrack)
4. The Beatles – LOVE
5. Queens of the Stone Age – Era Vulgaris
6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Is Is
7. Field Music – Tones of Town
8. Idlewild – Make Another World
9. Caribou – Andorra
10. Ryan Adams – Easy Tiger

To see what some of the professionals think, I recommend the AV Club Best Music of 2007 list. Much better than Pitchfork (even though I’ll read that one, too).

Tones of Town

I know we’re only a few short weeks into 2007, but I think I may have already found my most favorite album of the year:

Tones of Town

Field Music – Tones of Town

I discovered Field Music thanks to a little show on MTV2 called Subterranean. Believe it or not, MTV’s second channel still devotes about an hour a week to cool new music very late at night when noone is watching! According to the WikiPedia, Subterranean plays an average of nine videos in every hour-long show!

But… I digress! Field Music’s self-titled debut was easily my #1 album of 2006 (edging out The Obliterati by Mission of Burma by only a small margin, mind you!) According to iTunes, I’ve listened to their first album an average of about 50 times, and I still love listening to it! Few albums have achieved that kind of staying power with me… I admittedly have a verrry short attention span for music nowadays, and it’s an achievement if an album stays in heavy rotation for about 3-4 weeks.

The ultimate example of an album completely dominating my time was during the summer of 1997, when our friend OK Computer was pretty much the only thing I listened to for several long months. (This was, of course, back in the days of Discman, so the singular musical focus of that summer is perhaps a relic of the pre-iPod years.)

There have been few albums since 1997 that have captivated my attention span to such a level, but Field Music has definitely proven their staying power to me… and I think they’ve hit it out of the park again with album #2 – I bought this album last night, and I’ve already listened to it five seven times…

So, the moral of this story is… in general, ignore Pitchfork. In specific terms, go buy yourself some Field Music. You can also check out some of their songs at their MySpace page.

…And you should definitely check out this awesome video for “In Context”:

Five Years

Sorry to be a little pretentious, but I think this is fitting for what is an inauspicious anniversary:

“Five Years” by David Bowie

Pushing thru the market square, so many mothers sighing
News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in
News guy wept when he told us, earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying
I heard telephones, opera house, favourite melodies
I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TVs
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there
And all the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people
All the nobody people and all the somebody people
I never thought I’d need so many people
A girl my age went off her head, hit some tiny children
If the black hadn’t a-pulled her off I think she would have killed them
A soldier with a broken arm, fixed his stare to the wheels of a Cadillac
A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer threw up at the sight of that
I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour drinking milkshakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine, don’t think you knew you were in this song
And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor
And I thought of Ma and I wanted to get back there
Your face, your race, the way that you talk
I kiss you, you’re beautiful, I want you to walk

We got five years, stuck on my eyes
We got five years, what a suprise
We got five years, my brain hurts alot
We got five years, that’s all we’ve got

well, there goes that weekend

man, weekends seem to go faster and faster these days… and it’s not like i’m using my time to anything particularly exciting…

on friday, i watched some dvds and shows, and then i spent some time figuring out how to make an animated gif of myself. now, i cannot honestly explain what made me decide to do this. mostly i think i was bored. anyways, here’s the final result:

!/images/eyebrows.gif!

on saturday night, i watched another handful of scrubs episodes and found out yet again that if i’m in a crappy mood (like i was saturday afternoon), all i have to do is sit down and watch a batch of scrubs episodes and my day is instantly lifted. it’s kind of amazing, actually. i also finished watching cowboy bebop, which was pretty good overall, although i felt like the series ending didn’t wrap things up as well as it could have.

i also figured out how to make my own ringtones for my phone. right now whenever anyone calls me, my phone plays “why do fools fall in love?”. other than however many minutes i used to access the internet, the whole thing was free, thanks to “this site”:http://rumkin.com/tools/sprint/index.php. personally, i think it was totally worth it.

in other news… something needs to be done about my ipod. the battery just doesn’t quite have the kick it used to. some days it’s good for 2 hours, and on others it dies after 20 minutes of use. to make matters worse, i think whatever claim form i sent off three months ago has disappeared into a legal black hole somewhere. oh well.

it’s starting to look like it’s time to pony up the $70 for a battery replacement. the more irresponsible choice, of course, would be to just buy a whole new ipod… one with more storage, of course. it’s gotten to the point where my ipod is constantly bursting at the seams. so far, however, i’ve resisted either possibility.

I like the rows of lights because they keep me calm

!{float: left; margin: 0 1em 1em 0;}/images/nada.jpg! tonight was the “nada surf”:http://nadasurf.com/ show at “emo’s”:http://www.emosaustin.com/. it was actually the third time i’ve seen them play. the first was well before they made a comeback, and they were opening for the impossibles, a local texas band. the second time was at emo’s about two or three years ago, just after they had started edging their way back into respectability – that show was inside on the tiny stage emo’s has in their front room. it was an exciting show because i was so into their last album, let go, and you could tell that they were confident and ready to face the world again.

this third show was on the big outside stage at emo’s. at this point, nada surf is back and well established in indie circles, and the outside area was packed even though it was pretty cold outside. they did have heaters running, but i was definitely still glad i brought my warm hat with me. it was a good show, but i was slightly less excited this time. it’s not that i’m less into their music – i think i was just in a weird mood or something. i suppose the fact that i couldn’t round up anyone to go with me did also put a little bit of a damper on things. anyways, it was a good show, they were definitely _on_ despite some sound problems, and they played all of the songs i wanted to hear.

one thing that was kind of annoying, though, was that about 30-45 minutes into the show a girl who had been standing next to me for a while started trying to talk to me, except she was plastered and i couldn’t hear a thing she was saying. despite this fact, she kept trying to talk to me, and kept trying to lean against me or put her arm around mine. she was either hitting on me or looking for someone to help her stand up straight. probably both. i tried to let her know that i really just wanted to be left alone so that i could watch the show, but this wasn’t really getting across, so finally i just had to give up my spot and walk around to the other side of the venue. this kind of sucked because i was further away, but i was really getting the impression that this girl was not going to leave me alone, and i was never going to figure out what the hell she was saying.

at the end of the show, i bought a nice little poster. i think i’m going to go get some frames tomorrow for that and my mission of burma poster. i’ve basically figured out that those little sticky tabs just aren’t going to work in this apartment – the walls aren’t the kind of smooth surfaces necessary to make things stick. i’ll just put up some nails and worry about fixing the holes whenever i move out.

on the way home, the roads were icy all over – i saw a bunch of fire trucks, cop cars and ambulances headed to or from accidents. i got stuck behind an accident on 35 for a little while, and then when i got to the 183 exit, it was blocked off by a cop car, most likely because the exit, a curving overpass, would be treacherous in tonight’s weather. i decided to go further north and take the Yager exit, since I know how to get to my place from there. this is the kind of driver i am, especially when i don’t have other people in the car to judge me – i’ll miss an exit and just casually find my way home some other way.

anyways, i was driving down the feeder road verrrry slowly because there was a long bridge coming up and i know from experience that car tires and icy bridges do not mix. i was driving about 25 miles an hour, and when i finally got over the bridge i looked off to my right and realized that there was a flipped car on the side of the road. the front bumper was in a ditch and the car had landed at a 45 degree angle with the tail end straight out in the air. for a second i couldn’t believe my eyes, and then i pulled over up ahead of it to check on the driver. (noting, as i did this, that several cars in front of me had just driven right past the accident.)

the car looked pretty bad. those few seconds while i walked up to the wreck were pretty scary, because i didn’t see any movement at first, but as i got a little closer i saw a face in the window, so i called out to the guy, who told me that he was okay. when i got up close, i reached down and helped him climb out through the window – he had just finished cutting off his seat belt. the whole thing had probably happened minutes before i got there, although i didn’t see it. the guy was, amazingly, fine, although he was pretty freaked out (understandably). once i got him out, i called 911 and waited with him for them to come. i felt pretty sorry for the guy – apparently his weekend had been bad already, and this was just icing on the cake.

after about 20 or 30 minutes, a cop and a wrecker came, and pretty soon after a fire truck pulled up as well. because the guy wasn’t hurt, he turned down EMS service, and once the tow truck turned his car over and towed it off, i gave him a ride home. perhaps the worst part for the poor guy was that he was literally minutes from his house. (isn’t there some statistic that says that most accidents happen when you’re a few miles from where you live?)

after that, i drove extra slow the whole way home, only stopping for a bit of whataburger because my stomach was rumbling. and now it’s 5am and i’m only a little sleepy. that’s what i get for taking a nap before the show. oh well. i’ll try and go to sleep here in a little while.

tomorrow night, “supergrass”:http://www.roadtorouen.co.uk at “the parish”:http://www.theparishroom.com/!

New is Good

I’ve found some excellent new music lately… in particular, i’ve been getting into My Morning Jacket.

Other recent additions include Death Cab For Cutie, Eagles of Death Metal, Kanye West, Kinski, Laura Veirs, Roxy Music, Sufjan Stevens (maaaan… _so_ good!), The Velvet Underground, and The Zombies.

I also just updated “Movable Type”:http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ to 3.2. It’s got some sexy new features, including this new default template that I’ve temporarily installed. My site needs a redesign (the “Iota Chapter”:http://www.iotachapter.org site needs it more…) and this is a stopgap for now.

After I got into the swing of “my new mouse”:http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/, I’ve started using “Dashboard”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/dashboard/ after all. It’s still a little persnickity, but seems to at least work better than it did before, and it’s cool to squeeze my mouse and have the Dashboard pop up.

Another nifty tool I’ve installed is “Growl”:http://growl.info, which is a system-wide notifications plugin. I mainly like it because it announces what song i’m listening to along with track art and other fun stuff.

Finally, in a bit of random coolness, as far as I can tell, Mr. Reed himself of “Reed’s Ginger Brew”:http://www.reedsgingerbrew.com found that “entry I made a few months back”:http://old.unsquare.com/dance/archives/2005/06/reeds_extra_gin.html when I tried their soda… and he left a comment thanking me for my mention. I feel so special!

make sure that you are sure of everything i do

!/images/burma.jpg!

last night i went to the first concert i’ve been to in a long while. i can’t remember for sure when i last went out to a show – it was probably badly drawn boy, though, and that was last october. i went and saw “mission of burma”:http://www.missionofburma.com, and i have to say that i’m damn glad that i happened to be listening to “KEXP”:http://kexp.org when, randomly enough, the DJ mentioned that they would be playing here in Austin. (This is random because KEXP is based out of Seattle.)

the show was quite a barn-burner… ear-blistering, paint peeling, wall-to-wall rock and roll… it was incredible how ferocious they were, and they played two full sets. this is a practice that more band should take up… the best shows i’ve been to have been two-setters. it was particularly cool that they were so rocking because, honestly, the guitarist looks like he should be planning a fishing trip somewhere, and they’re all in their mid-to-late forties, if not early fifties.

i also broke down and used the ATM outside the club to get some cash so that i could buy a poster. the damn ATM charged a $3.75 fee. highway robbery! …the poster, however, was worth it… not only was it made specially for the show, it’s signed and numbered – and it was only $10. it seemed like a better idea to spring for a poster than a shirt, because the shirts were the same ones i could get from their website, but the posters looked very one-time-only.

after the show, as i was walking down sixth street on the way back to my car, i was amazed yet again at how crazy downtown austin gets. i don’t usually hang out on sixth street when i go out, and it was easy to remember why.

especially surprising were the two girls i saw walking around topless. when i saw the first i thought she was just some drunk girl without inhibitions, but when i saw the second one, i knew it was some kind of trend. a bar must have been having a contest or something, who knows.

still, though, i only imagine such things happening in new orleans, or california, or wherever those crazy party towns are. whenever i go to the ginger man or places like mugshots and texas showdown, things always seem so sedate. ‘course, none of those bars are on sixth street, so that may be part of the reason why.

when i woke up this morning my ears were definitely still ringing, and i felt generally awful. i puttered around for a few hours, watched the “battlestar galactica”:http://scifi.com/battlestar/ season premiere (it was awesome), as well as the Stargate SG-1 premiere, which, honestly, i was only watching because Ben Browder is the new lead and i really miss Farscape, but which was also pretty entertaining, even though i definitely felt a good bit lost. (Claudia Black is a guest star, as well. It’s a pretty blatant grab at the attentions of Farscape fans… and it clearly worked on me. sigh.)

after a several-hour nap and some further puttering, i decided to finally sit down and start reading the new harry potter book, which i’m sure everyone else has finished by now. i’m a little over halfway in at this point, and only took a break to get some food and write a bit.

…and, well, actually, i might be tired now, so it looks like i may go to bed here in a bit.

i stole this from miles

*How many total songs?*
songs: 2499
days: 6.5
GB: 12.87

*Sort by Song Title*
First: (Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For? – Nick Cave
Last: Z?rich Is Stained – Pavement

*Sort by Time*
Shortest: Ask For Janice – The Beastie Boys (:11)
Longest: The Rainbow, Eden, Desire – Talk Talk (23:13)

*Sort by Album*
First: (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? – Oasis
Last: You Are Free – Cat Power

*Sort by Artist*
First: The 5, 6, 7, 8’s
Last: Yeah Yeah Yeahs

*Top Ten Most Played Songs* (reset my play count a few weeks ago)
1. One More Time -French Kicks, 19 times
2. Big Brat – Phantom Planet, 11 times
3. The Trial Of The Century – French Kicks, 10 times
4. Oh Fine – French Kicks, 9 times
5. Dirty Boots – Sonic Youth, 9 times
6. Made for TV Movie – Clem Snide, 8 times
7. Don’t Thank Me – French Kicks, 8 times
8. The Sound of German Hip Hop – Clem Snide, 7 times
9. Jews for Jesus Blues – Clem Snide, 7 times
10. Fill Me With Your Light – Clem Snide, 6 times

Search for “sex.” How many songs show up? 15
Search for “death.” How many songs show up? 5
Search for “love.” How many songs show up? 124

gravity decides

for some reason, every version of the lyrics for “gravity decides” by the folk implosion that i can find on the internet doesn’t include the following, from the second verse:

i collide with the world again
on the street, in the sky
sidestep tragedy
lean back casually
drank the poision, i survived

…which is a shame, because that’s my favorite part of the song.

the future of the music industry

Found a really interesting speech given by someone from The Register on possible business models that would work for the future of the music industry. Some of the stuff in there is kind of silly – I for one don’t care about a wireless iPod at the moment. I’m pretty damn good at getting my own music. Anyways, here’s the link: “how the music industry can live forever…”:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/23/orlowski_interactive_keynote/

miscellania

# Entertainment Weekly named The Grey Album as “Album of the Year” (“More…”:http://www.ew.com/ew/article/commentary/0,6115,1009259_4_0_,00.html)
# I downloaded a cool doohickey called “Konfabulator”:http://www.konfabulator.com/ for my Mac. Mark says it’s “so two years ago,” but I’m hooked.
# I’ve seen a ridiculous number of movies in theatres recently:
** Closer – 4/5 : Natalie Portman really is a good actress
** Kinsey – 5/5 : It’s amazing to think how differently people viewed sex just 50 years ago…
** Life Aquatic – 3/5 : I liked it, and yet it was my least favorite Wes Anderson movie.
** Lemony Snicket – 4/5 : Jim Carrey is both wild and a good actor in this movie, although he never grates or spends too much time onscreen.
# Oh, I forgot! What do you get when you cross The Beatles with the Beastie Boys? “The Beastles”:http://halley.lunarpages.com/~djbc002/beastles/

i was going to post this on omni-fan, but…

…apparently the sql is fucked somehow. anyways, i spent some time thinking about my “best” albums of 2004. the top 3 are easy. they go:

1. the arcade fire – funeral
2. sonic youth – sonic nurse
3. mission of burma – onoffon

the rest vaguely go like this, with very little order to them.

elliott smith – from a basement on a hill
interpol – antics (how passe of me! indie-dance is _sooooo_ over!)
nick cave & the bad seeds – abbatoir blues/lyre of orpheus
blur – think tank (it’s weird that i like this, cause i really hated it the first time i heard it…)
four tet – pause
loretta lynn – van lear rose
the kinks – are the village green preservation society (remaster)
of montreal – satanic panic in the attic
wilco – a ghost is born
brian wilson – smile

unabashed “guilty” pleasure:
kylie minogue – body language

selected songs from:
kanye west – college dropout
joanna newsom – whichever weirdness i ran across

older stuff:
sonic youth – daydream nation, murray street, a thousand leaves
mission of burma – s/t
gang of four – entertainment
jim o’rourke – bad timing
morphine – cure for pain

single most played song of 2004:
“sunday” by sonic youth, at a grand total of 35 times.

best advance album illictly downloaded last week:
lou barlow – emoh

I Have Made a Mix

I’m planning on making these downloadable once i’ve either found them elsewhere or put them up on the site. I’m pretty proud of this one, too.

MIX: I Ain’t Got Nothin’ to Be Scared Of

1. Anthrax – Gang of Four
2. Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) – The Arcade Fire
3. The Village Green Preservation Society – The Kinks
4. Twenty Three – Four Tet
5. Extraordinary Machine – Fiona Apple
6. Thursday – Morphine
7. Ambulance – Blur
8. The Enthusiast – Mission of Burma
9. Into The Groovey – Ciccone Youth
10. Get Ready For Love – Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds
11. Brand Of Skin – The Folk Implosion
12. What Does Your Soul Look Like? [Part 2] – DJ Shadow
13. “The Book of Right-On”:http://www.stereogum.com/joanna1.mp3 – Joanna Newsom
14. A Pretty Girl Is Like… – The Magnetic Fields
15. Two Way Monologue – Sondre Lerche
16. Sunday – Sonic Youth
17. Too Pure – Sebadoh
18. Sam Stone – Laura Cantrell

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain Reissue

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: La’s Desert Origins – October 26th

Disc 1: “Back to the Gold Soundz (Phantom Power Parable)”
01 Silence Kit
02 Elevate Me Later
03 Stop Breathin
04 Cut Your Hair
05 Newark Wilder
06 Unfair
07 Gold Soundz
08 5 – 4 = Unity
09 Range Life
10 Heaven Is a Truck
11 Hit the Plane Down
12 Fillmore Jive
13 Camera (Cut Your Hair B-side)
14 Stare (Cut Your Hair B-side)
15 Raft (Range Life B-side)
16 Coolin’ by Sound (Range Life B-side)
17 Kneeling Bus (Gold Soundz B-side)
18 Strings of Nashville (Gold Soundz B-side)
19 Exit Theory (Gold Soundz B-side)
20 5-4 Vocal (Gold Soundz B-side)
21 Jam Kids (Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain bonus 7-inch)
22 Haunt You Down (Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain bonus 7-inch)
23 Unseen Power of the Picket Fence (from No Alternative)
24 Nail Clinic (from Hey Drag City!)

Disc 2: “After the Glow (Where Eagles Dare)”
01 All My Friends
02 Soiled Little Filly
03 Range Life
04 Stop Breathin
05 Ell Ess Two
06 Flux=Rad
07 Bad Version of War
08 Same Way of Staying
09 Hands Off the Bayou
10 Heaven Is a Truck (Egg Shell)
11 Grounded
12 Kennel District
13 Pueblo (Beach Boys)
14 Fucking Righteous
15 Colorado
16 Dark Ages
17 Flood Victim
18 JMC Retro
19 Rug Rat
20 String of Nashville (instrumental)
21 Instrumental
22 Brink of the Clouds (Peel Session)
23 Tartar Martyr (Peel Session)
24 Pueblo Domain (Peel Session)
25 The Sutcliffe Catering Song (Peel Session)

Sky Captain…

…Bored me to tears, unfortunately. I was pretty damn disappointed with this movie. It wasn’t bad, it was just uninteresting. About half an hour in I wished pretty seriously that I was using my time in some other fashion.

Something that does make me happy, though, is that I bought this today:

Only $14 from Waterloo. I haven’t had a chance to watch more than about two or three of the videos, but I figured buying the DVD was a better solution than just buying cds that I already have on my iPod – this way, I support Sonic Youth, but get something new out of the deal. I really want to get a turntable so I can feel justified buying records (again, the same theory; support the band, but get something new out of the deal).

I was sorely tempted by the newest Sonic Youth and Mission of Burma albums (speaking of Mission of Burma, OnOffOn is actually really good… I just hadn’t given it a chance until recently), both available on vinyl, but I knew that such a purchase would be pointless because I wouldn’t get to enjoy them for the forseeable future, and I already have a good handful of records I can’t listen to.

From a Basement on a Hill

So I found Elliott Smith’s new album online, and I couldn’t resist…

When I was listening to “King’s Crossing,” my heart stopped.


the big problem is the main attraction
dominoes are falling in a chain reaction
the scraping subject ruled by fear told me
whiskey works better than beer
the judge is on vinyl, decisions are final
and nobody gets a reprieve
and every wave is tidal – if you hang around
you’re going to get wet
i can’t prepare for death any more than i already have
all you can do now is watch the shells
the game looks easy that’s why it sells
frustrated fireworks inside your head
are going to stand and deliver talk instead
the method acting that pays my bills
keeps the fat man feeding in beverly hills
i got a heavy metal mouth that hurls obscenity
and i get my check from the trash treasury
cos i took my own insides out
it don’t matter cos i had no sex life
all i want to do now is inject my ex wife
i’ve seen the movie and i know what happens
it’s a christmas time
and the needles on the tree
a skinny santa is bringing something to me
his voice is overwhelming, but his speech is slurred
and i only understand every other word
“open your parachute and grab your gun
falling down like an omen, a setting sun
read the part and we turn out fine
it’s a hell of a role if you can keep it alive
but i don’t care if i fuck up
i’m going on a date with a rich white lady
ain’t life great?
give me one good reason not to do it
this is a place where time reverses
dead men talk to all the pretty nurses
instruments shine on a silver tray
don’t let me be carried away
don’t let me be carried away
don’t let me be carried away