Apr 8, 2008
Nov 9, 2007
Things I Like Lately
There are some things that I like. Software and other things. Roundup:
Yep
Yep is iTunes for PDFs. If you don't collect PDFs like you collect music, this won't be appealing to you. Personally, I'm grabbing presentations, papers, tutorials, and books every day, all the time. This wouldn't be half as much fun without Yep's tagging and browsing. I also make heavy use of the "YepShot" bookmarklet that takes the web page you're looking at and pops it in your PDF library. Yep doesn't try to be an outboard brain like DevonThink. It just stores and organizes collections of PDFs like nobody's business.
Whisky
I went to Whiskey Fest SF with several of my coworkers. Favorites included Jura's Superstition blended Scotch, Old Pogue bourbon, and Macallen's Amber maple Scotch whisky liqueur. I also recommend having a quality Manhattan if you haven't ordered one in a while. You'll be happy you did.
Gmail IMAP
I can now use Gmail on my iPhone. It works awesome.
I can't say the same for the Mail.app in Leopard, though I give it a try every couple days. I've been using Mailplane on my MacBook Pro with great success. Just enough value added to the in-browser Gmail interface without getting in the way.
Music
DJ A-Trak's Kanye's Soul Mix Show has got so much soul. The newest Jens Lekman record, Night Falls on Kortedala has also been in heavy rotation. I'm seeing him tonight at Bimbo's, the best live music venue in San Francisco.
My Etymotics headphones died and I replaced them with a pair of Vibe Duos. While the Vibe's certainly aren't as accurate, their bouncy bass and handy iPhone-compatible mic makes them a pretty solid choice. Plus, they're exactly the price of an iPhone rebate, if you have one on hand.
Twitter Things
Spaz and Snitter are impressive examples of what Adobe AIR can do. Both are desktop Twitter clients that make extensive use of the API I maintain, and both authors have been excellent contributors to the Twitter development community. Also a big nod to Twitteriffic 3, definitely worth the asking price for all the work that Craig has put into it.
Foamee just launched. It's a way to keep track of people you owe beers to. It's one of the best-designed Twitter projects I've seen.
Apr 15, 2007
Mar 10, 2007
Dec 15, 2006
Oh Gosh We're Back
It’s been too long, but here’s an early holiday
Share the joy.
Oct 23, 2006
Replacement Killaz
If you’re missing Serious DJs mixes, try the latest from Scattermish as a decidedly sugar-inclusive substitute. Kid can mix. Kid’s got tunes. Grab it.
Aug 30, 2006
Albums Of The Mid-Year
More than halfway through 2006 there are only two records I think I’ll still adore in a few more months:
- He Poos Clouds by Final Fantasy and
- Burial’s self-titled full length.
Clearly I need to scrounge more music. I’m getting to that point when looking through my library is like a grocery aisle full of unappetizing canned foods.
Aug 14, 2006
Serious Touring
In a few minutes Craig and I are leaving to play the first date of our DJing tour. Three cities, three nights: Boston, Providence, NYC. More info on the Serious DJs site.
So far, no problems. We made good time from DC to Boston despite a traffic jam in New York. A little tired but no pre-show jitters. Big mix plannned tonight, believe.
If you’re on a tour stop come check us out.
Jun 16, 2006
Apr 10, 2006
Oh Guillotine
It’s been a long time since I found a record that I just couldn’t stop listening to. Longer still since I found two.
For the past week my headphones have been, as they say, pwned by British Sea Power. Day after day I’ve been listening first to The Decline of British Sea Power, then Open Season, then selected songs from each, and then repeating the whole affair mere hours later. For someone who prides himself on constantly listening to new music this is distressing behavior.
These two records are a little too good. Such a relatively young band should not be capable of such exceptional melodic construction and lyrical depth. If both records weren’t so hopeful, human, and blissed-out I’d suggest that something sinister is afoot. I’m not convinced that lead singer and lyricist Jan didn’t strike a Faustian bargain: “oh, sure, you’ll make two brilliant records, but the second track on the first record has to have a Dosteyevsky thing going on. Bwahahahahaha!”
If you’re taken with the historical bent of The Decemberists, imagine more rock, more musical diversity and risk-taking, more smarts, and more swearing. Take these lyrics from “Be Gone” on Open Season:
Agonic lines, ascendances and amatory tendencies
From here to heart arrhythmias
Oh don’t you know we’re not like this
Oh Floreal
Oh guillotine
Oh Floreal
I love your iridescent sheen
As it reflects you and it reflects me
Floreal, if you didn’t know (I sure didn’t) is the eighth month in the French Republican Calendar. Yeah. But it’s not all that dense. “To Get To Sleep” is full of simple themes and simpler rhymes; it’s just about as literal as it gets:
Melatonin, a little dose, takes things to a peaceful close
Commerce runs through your veins
And takes you from this waking plane
Industry on your side
To do what you do, when you get tired
Eight hours a day – call it twenty years
There’s a place you can go
Free of lust, cupidity and fear
Lyrics aside, British Sea Power can freak the fuck out. “Lately” off their first record is a thirteen minute epic that closes in searing feedback, desperate shouting, and drum kit chaos. Somehow it all manages to stay in the Q And Not U realm of palatable dissonance. I’m kicking myself for not knowing about them and seeing them live sooner. God knows what crazy shit they used to do with that track.
Anyway. A band love affair is a peculiar thing, and though I hope you’ll share my enthusiasm chances are good that British Sea Power just won’t strike you the same way. Not everyone wants to sing along to songs about the Trojan Horse, and that’s fine.
So what records or artists can you listen to endlessly?
Feb 14, 2006
Happy Valentine's Day
...or, as I like to call it, International Lonely Shoegazers Have An Ironic Listen Of “Loveless” Day.
Seriously, you should listen to this record anyway. It’ll change the way you think about music, and probably explain where a few of your favorite bands got their ideas.
Unrelated, the older I get and the longer I’m single, the more I like hearing stories of happy couples. Pretty soon I’m going to be renting stealing romantic comedies and crying at weddings and so forth.
Listen to the record already.
Jan 31, 2006
Seriously
It’s time to unveil this project I’ve been going on about.
Take a gander at Serious DJs. Go on. Take a quick look and then head back here.
You’re back? Cool. Now, the story.
A few months ago I was having some beers with Craig at the Brickskeller and we were, as usual, bullshitting about music. To say that Craig and I are music buddies is an understatement. Our iTunes libraries look 75% alike, I’d say. We each make sure the other has heard the best new albums, new radio jams, and new mixes. We can talk about music for hours, and frequently do.
Now, Craig also makes music. He’d played around a bit with DJing but had never gotten way into it. I’d been missing it. So I say: “why don’t we work on DJing together?”
So we did. And are.
Craig brought me up to speed with new features in Ableton Live. We started working through track lists, choosing a theme and meticulously piecing songs together. The first couple mixes took the better part of a day, each. The most recent one went faster, as we’ve fallen into a work routine.
Right now we’ve got a jungle mix, a Screw mix, and a discoish mix on the site, all free for the taking. If you like what you hear, please spread the word: link the site, tag it on del.icio.us, share the MP3s, or just play them for a friend.
We hope you have as much fun listening to these and future mixes and we have making them.
Jan 20, 2006
On Coheed & Cambria
It is difficult to convince someone that Coheed & Cambria are, well, good.
Coheed have an enormous amount working against them: their undeserved and inaccurate pigeonholing as an emo band; lead singer Claudio Sanchez’s big rock star hair and eerily high, childlike voice; their simultaneous musical nods to the prog rock of Rush and the ‘70s stadium rock of Led Zeppelin; the sci-fi subject matter of their songs; their comically elaborate album titles; their comic book.
Worst of all, however, are their fans. Coheed fans are, by and large, terrible human beings. I don’t think this was always the case. The dedicated longtime fan who introduced me to their music was a pleasant sort, endearingly and appropriately nerdy. He would be difficult to spot in the sea of fratboys and fratboys-to-be that now comprise the average Coheed concert audience. These people are appallingly adolescent, regardless of age. They are glaringly suburban. They will press their way to the front of the stage without even a false apology to those getting shoved along the way. They will shout unpleasantries not only at the opening band(s), but at Coheed & Cambria themselves. They do not want to hear new songs. They talk about inane and terrible things loudly both between bands and during sets. They take cell phone calls during songs. They call friends during songs and hold their phone towards the music, checking periodically if their friends can hear how fucking sweet that shit is. They cannot mosh appropriately, only seethe and teem. They wear the band’s shirts to their shows.
I am willing to set all this aside, however, because Coheed rule. No, not just “rule”. They make the sort of music that inspires a rock-averse person like me to throw up the horns, smile a stupid smile, and belt out their songs with the rest of the sea of fratboys. They make me confused as to whether I should be playing air guitar or air drums, or some spastic combination of the both. The mere sight of their signature keywork logo projected on an empty stage is enough to inspire hysterics in the crowd. They can play twenty minute renditions of their songs, complete with behind-the-head guitar solos, to a rapt packed house. They just totally rule.
Their music unfolds the elaborate story of a world essentially like our own, save warring dieties and interstellar whatnot and science gone awry. The band’s name is taken from the hero and heroine of this story, a husband and wife lab-enginereed to be mankind’s safeguard against the oppressive race fated to rule them. Each song is another chapter in their family’s destiny, and each album an arch in the epic tale.
Now, you could take all this into consideration when listening, or simply set it aside and rock the fuck out. Understanding the story, however, lends weight to the emotive (but not emo!) passages on Coheed’s three LPs. Knowing, for example, that the character in Neverender is in the midst of both family crisis and divine war gives the song far more gravity. That song’s closing refrain of “point your gun in another direction / now that you’ve cried yourself to sleep” isn’t just some band’s ploy to grab the attention and dollars of gloomy teens; it’s a writer with genuine sympathy for his characters, baring it all.
Which brings me to the point of why I’d take the time to defend the band at all: Claudio is a brilliant writer. Not just a songwriter, but a craftsman of other worlds in the mold of Tolkien, Asimov, and Lucas. He’s young, and that comes through at times, but in Coheed & Cambria he’s populated a complex and compelling universe with characters he truly feels for. Most modern fiction authors can’t accomplish anything of the caliber without even having to consider setting their words to a tune. Today’s vapidly introspective songwriters can barely churn out yet another jilted love song, much less weave a story from track to track and album to album. All this gets glossed over because reviewers can’t ascertain the story in Claudio’s lyrics, and it’s is a goddamn shame.
There’s no accounting for taste, and simply not liking Coheed’s soaring guitars and Claudio’s distinct voice can’t be argued with. It took me a number of listens to get into The Second Stage Turbine Blade. Every new album they release requires similar patience. It’s a labor of love, Coheed fandom, but the payoff is being able to come back to a collection of albums that make for deeper listening, as if you’re simultaneously listening to your favorite record and re-reading your favorite novel. It’s a guilty, fantastic pleasure, and that’s why I’ll be there for their next tour, braving the crowd of assholes, air-guitaring all the way to the House Atlantic.
Nov 12, 2005
On The Blood Brothers
It is my understanding that somewhere, with some group of people, the The Blood Brothers are quite popular. Not amongst my friends, however, and certainly not amongst the audience of this past week’s two Coheed & Cambria shows in Baltimore and DC. I attended both, and the few Blood Brothers fans were greatly outnumbered by Coheed fans grumbling that they’d never heard worse music in their lives. That, however, is an entirely separate post.
The Blood Brothers make dissonant and, initially, offputting music. I was in a foul mood when I really took the time to give their Burn Piano Island Burn a proper listen, and said mood lubricated an otherwise abrasive first listen. Under the surface din, the Blood Brothers have a complex and engaging musicality. Quick tempo and stylistic changes are their instrumentalists’ forte, proving them are a hardcore act at heart.
It’s the dueling vocals of singers Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney that drew me into the band’s records, however. Both have a tendency towards screaming, but can drop into a menacing talking-on-pitch or caterwauling wail at the drop of a hat. Johnny’s voice is particularly unsettling, occupying upper registers usually reserved for sopranos delivering arias, not eardrum-piercing shrieks.
This vocal delivery suits the Blood Brothers’ nightmarish lyrics, which are best understood as the evolution of a punk motif. The first crop of American punk bands wrote literal, plainly worded songs about their dismal surroundings, eg Fear’s “I Love Livin’ In The City”. The second wave took this in a more whimsical direction, moving from mere description to fantasies of empowerment, eg the Dead Kennedys’ “Let’s Lynch The Landlord”. Now, some thirty-odd years since the emergence of punk, bands like the Blood Brothers are the absurdists of the day, offering distorted pictures of a world that’s slipped away from the humane into something monstrous and unrecognizable.
Take “Ambulance vs Ambulance”, in which the vehicles and medical personnel we associate innately with anonymous and everpresent safety are transformed into moral enforcers. An example in tune with the band’s predecessors’ criticisms of mainstream culture:
You'll never see your wife and children again
so tell us what it was going through your head
when you looked into their eyes
and said "no thanks, I'll take the hooker instead."
You'll never see that office again
so when the nurse amputates both of your thighs
come a little bit closer to the mic
and tell us what you miss more: your desk or the hungry sky.
The song that follows on Burn Piano Island Burn, “USA Nails”, relays a disturbing conversation between a prison inmate and a phone-sex-operator-cum-Dial-a-Confession. One passage is a Lynchian snapshot of the sick underside of suburban teenage lust:
Do you remember that night in the back of daddy's car?
Strumming the chords of your pubic guitar?
The way you tasted just like a movie star?
The way the windshield reflected the sunrise?
The way the light tattooed your thighs?
Oh, you're the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world.
Your time is up, 'till next time... we'll send you a bill.
There’s more criticism of modern coupling on Crimes’s “Love Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreck”, perhaps my favorite of their songs for its conveyance of the plausible and wrenching story of a callous young man burned and disfigured in a car accident, dutifully visited by a girl he never had the capacity to love. His punishment is a howling caution against taking people for granted:
She met him a week after you left her
when you tossed out her touch to the garbage collector.
He talked her out of her skirt in his beer-soaked apartment
and then they did all the things
you never said that you wanted.
And the sirens are laughing underneath your skull.
And your thoughts are turning dull, callous, and cold.
As is clear, when the band forays into human nature they linger on the dark side, like the serial killer ballad of “The Salesman Denver Max”. Yet many of their songs linger in more poetic realms, calling forth birds and other animals to roam around rotting trashscapes. They’re not the happiest young men, in short, but their dystopian daymares are our listening pleasure.
The band’s stage show is well done, a premeditated selection of newer and older material with a comfortable amount of improvisation and Sonic Youth-inspired feedback experimentation. For all the whirling aggression of their music, the Blood Brothers leave the jumping about to their fans, preferring to remain fairly stationary while delivering the utmost brutality from their instruments and vocal chords. It’s not an act that will engender new fans, but it pleased the handful of us at the Coheed shows.
Oct 25, 2005
Sep 22, 2005
M.I.A at the 9:30 Club
I’ve been looking forward to seeing M.I.A. live for ages now, having missed her previous show in DC with self-conscious indie unfortunates LCD Soundsystem. Not only do I have an enormous crush on her, but the combination of a leaked copy of Arular and her mixtape collaboration with Diplo Piracy Funds Terrorism soundtracked several straight months of my life.
The 9:30 Club is no longer my favorite venue in the area. As “alternative” and “independent” have become the mainstream, what was once a great space for a semi-known act to play is now too big and crowded a space for bands I’d rather see in a more intimate venue, like the Ottobar or Black Cat. Hip-hop is particularly awkward at the 9:30; the venue just has a white rawker kid vibe it can’t shake, Chuck Brown birthday bashes or no. Color me surprised, then, that M.I.A. sold the place out the day before tonight’s show.
As the club filled up I saw exactly the audience I figured M.I.A. would draw: exceedingly multiracial and international, just fashionable enough, and easily 60% female if not more. For a genre- and culture-spanning iconoclast, M.I.A. is hitting her target demographic dead on.
Openers Spank Rock were reputed to deliver a filthy Baltimore Club sound, but instead spun a tame mix of oldies and rare groove remixes until they were joined by an MC, a hand-drummer, and a 3-girl dance squad shakin’ what their respective mothers gave them. They did several respectable, head-knodding props-rhyme and party tracks, presumably from an upcoming LP, and left the crowd well warmed-up.
The stage was set for M.I.A. with colorful props of tigers, palm trees, and helicopters against a graffiti tapestry. Her DJ, accompanied by visuals on two flatpanel TVs, opened with a Negativland-style cutup of Bush and Blair exclaiming: “the only thing I’m interested in is… M.I.A.!” You and me both, buddy.
When she hopped on stage, backed up by a hype girl of sorts, I was instantly somewhat disappointed. Sure, she’s attractive and commanding, but you could instantly tell that she was going through the motions. Her MC banter between songs was flat, and her encouragements to “do something, change something” were about as genuine and inspiring as a self-help video.
Though topical, her Diplo-standin DJ’s samples of Kayne West declaring post-Katrina that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” typified the pop politicization of the M.I.A. platform: we’re not really sure how this revolution thing is supposed to work, but these beats sure are hott! (The beats, by the by, were largely from Piracy Funds Terrorism, and not much of interest was done by way of live remixing, save a brief swap-in of a David Banner track).
In a particularly offputting moment between songs she bemoaned that “my press is all about how much press I get,” a sentiment delivered with a bit too much celebrity for me to stomach. Would she prefer that her press covers how stellar she is, or perhaps the causes she believes in? What’s a media darling to expect if not an oroborus of analysis?
After a half hour a most she left the stage for the first time, creating artificial demand for what should’ve been less an encore than the continuation of a brief and hardly demanding set. She came back and, towards the end of the second song, pulled an almost peculiarly un-DC selection of people up on stage. These people were so well ethnically mixed, so perfectly dressed and instantly ready to dance on stage in front of several hundred people, that the paranoid in me briefly entertained the suspicion that they were plants. I was largely dissuaded from this hunch when one of the kids planted an apparently unexpected kiss on M.I.A. before diving back into the crowd, hugely pleased with himself.
Diplo was apparently lurking stage right, and hopped up for the encores, although not assuming the decks from M.I.A.’s alternate DJ. Her last number was “Hombre,” and the night was over just after 11PM. The audience, and indeed the friend who joined me, seemed pleased, but it wasn’t the show I was hoping for.
It’s got be hard for M.I.A., having positioned herself as a rebel and so quickly been adopted as a leftist, globalist, neo-neo-feminist poster child. But my expectation wasn’t to leave the club having been conveyed a meaningful social platform so much as to have my party thoroughly rocked. Maybe an earlier tour date would have shown a more enthusiastic side of M.I.A., but tonight’s performance just wasn’t revolutionary.
Sep 6, 2005
Deliver A Favor
Coheed and Cambria, pretty much my favorite band to sing along to, is on tour with the Blood Brothers, pretty much my favorite band to scream along to. They’re playing two shows in the DC area in November. The first is on Saturday the 5th at Sonar in Baltimore. The second is Monday the 7th at the 9:30 Club.
I have one ticket to each. None of my friends are fans of either band, so I will go alone. Last year Co&Ca played the 9:30 Club the day after my 21st birthday, and I got to smugly drink a Guiness whilst the kiddies moshed about. Good times.
At any rate, if you’re also going to these shows, you should let me know. We can be all, “I really enjoy the Coheed & Cambria comic book, no matter how nerdy it is. Songs about intergalactic war are awesome.”
And so forth.
Jul 9, 2005
The Ghosts of Dead Teenagers Sing to Me While I Am Dancing
If you missed My Favorite at the Rickshaw Stop last night you pretty much blew it. Nobody else writes songs about languishing in love and music and loneliness like they do. And If someone does, well, they don’t have the stage presence to compete.
“When the dance floor clears, I walk home alone with their voices still in my ears.”
Mar 18, 2005
The Most Played-Out Playlist in DC
...or Why I Wasn’t At Bluestate Last Night.
At least Baltimore is getting a healthy shot of Hollertronix in April.
This is me restraining my rage at the DC blogging scene, by the way. I’ve got a novella of hate (also accepted: “a quarto of loathing”) in my head, but I’m just gonna take a deep breath and let it slide. The web doesn’t need more unpleasantness.
