Category: Listening To…

Metallica – Master Of Puppets. Just backfilling my collection here. But wow, what an album. Half of the lyrics make no sense at all, but they sound good. The iPod absolutely loves it.

The Decembrists – Her Majesty. Neutral Milk Hotel meets the Smiths. An acceptable combination, since neither of those bands are doing anything with the styles they pioneered.

The Decembrists – The Crane Wife. Not as interesting as “Her Majesty”. It’s a lot less anachronistic and a bit more mainstream. It has its charms, but some of the songs (“Perfect Crime”, “When The War Came”) I find downright obnoxious.

Mission Of Burma – The Obliterati. I missed them the first time around, and have only heard a few songs from their early days – and I like what I’ve heard of them. But this record, released in 2006, sounds as if it could’ve been written back in the 80’s, it’s so chock-full of early post-punk goodness: loud, aggressive, defiant, angular, dissonant. It definitely doesn’t at all sound like a band in its 24th year. And as a bonus, listening to this stuff puts other, later, loud post-punk bands like Polvo, Fugazi, the Pixes and even the mighty Sonic Youth into perspective. These guys were doing it first, and they’re still doing it today.

Devendra Banhart – Cripple Crow. There’s a bit of the airy mystical chamber-folk of Nick Drake and a bit of the cheery modern pop-folk of Bright Eyes, a little Latin flavor, some hippy folk stuff. Innaresting.

Beatles – 65. This came from a bunch of LPs my father sent me to rip to CD. Great record. I wasn’t sure about my fondness for early Beatles, but this is infectious, energetic stuff.

Gillian Welch – Black Star EP. Awesome. There are only three songs: Black Star, Pocahontas, White Freightliner Blues. I’ve had this for a long time, and I assumed the songs were all covers, but never bothered looking up who wrote the songs. Then, one day, “Black Star” popped-up on the iPod, but it was Radiohead… huh. Now I know. Gillian’s version is a lot better, IMO – it’s a great song, but the Radiohead version sounds busy, and compressed by comparison. “Pocahontas” is a Neil Young song, and again, Gillian’s version is better. The third song is a Townes Van Zandt song, but I already knew that.

Robyn Hitchcock – Robyn Sings. Robyn sings Bob Dylan, to be accurate. It’s a compilation of Robyn doing Bob Dylan covers. Some are good. Some are kind of rough. Some sound like bootlegs. Since Dylan, like Neil Young, is one of those songwriters I like better when other people do his songs, this is a nice way to sample a bunch of Dylan I’d probably otherwise never hear.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done this kind of post… many new things, so I’ll be brief.

• Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings The Flood. This is good stuff. It has a slight bit of anachronistic old-time country vibe, but not enough to say that it is country. Nice voice.
• Brandi Carlisle – Brandi Carlisle. Kinda folky, singer-songwritery. I like it, even though I get the feeling this is probably a huge hit with the teenage girl demographic. She has a good voice and the melodies are often very nice – i keep hearing echoes of early 70’s power pop, not sure why.
• Modern Jazz Quartet – Django. A delicious serving of mid 50’s jazz – big on melody, big on tone, big on improv – with vibraphone!
• King Crimson – Discipline. I’ve had the LP since the mid 80’s, but I never got around to getting the CD. Since most of the songs are on whatever King Crimson “Best Of” CD I have, it never seemed important. But, my completist urge finally got the best of me and I decide to get the CD (and the CD has an alternate take of Matte Kudasai, bonus). Side note: I put together a DVD slide show of our Japan pictures and used Matte Kudasai (means “Please Wait” in Japanese) as part of the soundtrack. Every time we’ve shown the slideshow, someone has asked me “what is this song? who is this?” – they love it.
• Robyn Hitchcock – A Star For Bram. This is just another of his outtakes and remixes collections. There are some interesting things, and a lot of so-so things. But, I’m a Hitchcock addict, so I gotsta have it.
• Calexico – Feast Of Wire / Garden Ruin . This is a great band. They are all over the place stylistically: straightforward rock, jazz, Mexican, country, stuff that sounds like a spaghetti western soundtrack, etc., but it all comes out sounding like Calexico.
• Love and Rockets – Love and Rockets. These guys were pretty big in my college dorm room; my roommate was a big fan. It’s a pretty dark record, even for these guys; and there are some good songs, mixed in with a lot of nonsense. But it’s all quite dated, now – that semi-goth industrial-ish Euro-pop thing didn’t last much past the late 80s. In my defense, I was pretty drunk when I clicked “Buy This”.
• Gillian Welch – Black Star / Relevator Collection. iTunes has two live Gillian EP’s, both of which I think are made from songs off the Relevator Collection DVD. I bought them both and interleaved the songs onto a single CD for my car. All good stuff – David Rawlings even gets to sing one.
• Marah – If You Didn’t Laugh… . Stones-ish roots rock. Pretty good.
• Jurassic 5 – Power In Numbers. I don’t like rap in general, but once in a while I find something that I can kindof get into. It helps that this isn’t strictly thumping bass and cock-grabbing.

And what does he hear ?

• Twin A – Disappear . My wife and I saw them in Rochester, NY a few weeks back, at a club called Milestones (where, back in the day, many of my old bands played). I assume they’re still a local band, because I haven’t seen much about them on the net. They were loud, the sound was crap, but we could make out enough of it to know we liked it – so we bought their CD. And, it is good. They sound like a band that could get a lot of college/alternative radio play these days – emotional guitar pop.
• Madeleine Peyroux – Careless Love. … … BILLIE HOLIDAY!! Ok. There’s no getting around it, the woman sounds like the reincarnation of Billie Holiday. She does very approachable blues/jazz versions of standards new and old (including, to my surprise, Elliot Smith’s Between The Bars). The whole thing has a nice, slow relaxed vibe – with the vocals up front and clean. I like it, but I just can’t shake the feeling that I’m listening to Billie Holiday – which is a compliment, of course.
• Rolling Stones – Let It Bleed. What’s to be said… it’s everything you’d expect from a record that starts with Gimme Shelter and ends with You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Well, there is a problem… the problem with buying Rolling Stones records these days is that all of them have two or three songs that you’ve already heard a skrillion times – why would I want to pay for a copy of You Can’t Always Get What You Want ? Especially since I already have it, and all the others, on Hot Rocks. Luckily, iTunes lets you buy tracks individually, so I just bought everything but the first and last songs, then told iTunes that the Hot Rocks versions are actually from Let It Bleed (can’t have a song on more than two albums ? WTF ?). Problem solved.
• Andrew Bird – Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Production of Eggs. An great blend of styles (folk, rock, swing, jazz, etc) with intelligent, oblique, and often dark lyrics that are delivered in a voice that reminds me a lot of Beck’s quieter moments – or maybe John Mayer (gasp).
  Overprescribed
  Under the mister
  We had survived to
  Turn on the History Channel
  And asked our esteemed panel
  `Why are we alive?’
  And here’s how they replied:
  `You’re what happened when two substances collide
  And by all accounts you really should’ve died.’

  I like it quite a lot.

• Flaming Lips – Clouds Taste Metallic. Back in 1995, these guys weren’t making polished synth-heavy psychedelic pop records about robots, Superman and spider bites, like they are today; no, back in 95, they were making fuzzed-out, distortion-laden lo-fi psychedelic pop records about giraffes and lighting striking the postman. But, listening to this, it’s clear that the song structures and melodic style haven’t changed much, just the sounds they make – it’s the same band, just with a different instrumentation and approach to recording. And I like it.
• The Colorblind James Experience – Greatest Hits! . Few bands have truly unique sounds; with many bands you can pick out a few clear influences and draw a pie chart that shows how much each band contributed to their sound – but not with CBJE. Their sound is more a blend of genres than of bands; and it’s not a matter of jumping from style to style between or within songs like some other non-classifiable bands, CBJE’s sound is itself a blend of rock, lounge jazz, jumpy polka, lazy country/western, etc.. I’ve heard it described as “circus rock”. Many of their songs just repeat the same few bars again and again, hypnotically, while different instruments (including a vibraphone and horns) solo over it and the singer tells a story in his laconic deadpan voice; and even the fast songs have a definite mellow vibe to them – sure it’s danceable, but you can just sit and groove on it, man. Their first album is my favorite because the songs are just a bit more willfully oblique than their later stuff (ie. they started to lose a bit of their edge), IMO. But, that album is completely impossible to find these days; I had a cassette of it when I was in college, but I think it got tossed along the way. They were never really big in the US, outside of their hometown of Rochester NY and they’re defintely an acquired taste, so finding a CD copy of it has turned into a real quest. So, this “Greatest Hits!” record will have to do; and while it has a lot from that first record it also has a lot of their later stuff that just doesn’t grab me the same way. Sadly, the band is no more, as (singer/vibe player) Colorblind James himself passed away a few years ago. Never went to see them when I had the chance, though I think one of my bands opened for them at a festival once. Regret.

• Helio Sequence : Love And Distance – Busy, dense, electro-bleepy and hooky, but not spaced-out and retro like Stereolab, more like an upbeat and busy Radiohead.
• Elliot Smith : From a Basement on the Hill – Just got this a few days ago. So far, it sounds like the album you’d expect to hear after his Figure 8 – the classic Elliot Smith sound – melancholy, witty, melodic, personal; maybe a little less heavily-produced than Figure 8. It’s hard not to find lines in these songs that sound like goodbyes or self-eulogies.
• U2 : War/Under A Blood Red Sky/Unforgettable Fire – I bought a little phono-preamp so I could plug my turntable into my sound card, and so I’ve started copying my old vinyl albums to MP3. These were in the first batch.

  I wasn’t expecting much, but hearing these three albums again was a mini-revalation. I’d forgotten just how good U2 was back then. Aside from the rancid-from-overplay radio staples (Sunday Bloody Sunday, Pride, New Years Day, etc), these are really great albums. Songs like Wire, Bad, Two Hearts Beat As One, Gloria, and so on, still sound as good to me today as they did back in ’84. And I still shake my head in amazement at the Edge’s playing on Wire – how can anyone be that fast and accurate?

• ZZ Top – Tres Hombres : It’s really hard to believe that the band who made this simple, greasy, groovy, wonderful record is the same band who wrote Sharp Dressed Man, made the videos with the silly spinning guitars and wore trench coats and matching hipster Santa beards. Someone should research their wherabouts during the late-70’s to find out when the Bizzaro World novelty act ZZ Top replaced the best Texas blues band ever. Maybe if we pinpoint the location of the wormhole they fell into, we could do some magic to get them swapped back for the originals.

  Like the U2 records above, this was had been lingering in vinyl limbo for more than a decade, until last week.

• The Doors – Alive She Cried : Well. Ya know. Now that I’m not 16, Jim Morrisson isn’t quite as impressive an intellect. But silly lyrics aside, his voice and the music is still good. And how can you not love an extended live version of Light My Fire ? Actually, don’t answer. Another vinyl rescue.