Monthly Archives: February 2009

Listening To...

  • MGMT - Oracular Spectacular. It took me a little while to get into this one, but after putting it in my car's CD player for a few weeks, I've grown to like it. It's shiny modern alternative electro-pop, very much in the same league as the New Pornographers and Broken Social Scene, but with retro-echoes of things as anachronistic as the Pixies and early Prince.
    Four raquos : » » » »

  • Q-Tip - The Renaissance. Another trial in my eternal quest to find hip-hop that I like which wasn't made in 1992: a new record from the guy who made his name as part of one of those early-90's groups (A Tribe Called Quest). Q-Tip is still as fun as he was back in the day, but the music is much more modern - even being so modern as to pick up on the same early 80's revival vibe as MGMT mines. I like it much better than most of the other modern hip-hop I've been sampling, though I'm afraid a lot of that's because it's so similar to ATCQ.
    Three raquos: » » »

  • Rokia Traoré - Tchamantché. I don't have a lot of experience with music from Mali. I have a little Boubacar Traoré (no relation, AFAIK) and some Ali Farka Touré, and what I have is all bare-bones and hypnotic guitar with repetitive lyrics. You can tell this comes from the same place where those two, older, musicians came from, but this has a much more polished and contemporary production - the recording is better, the sounds are much more balanced, and the songs don't do that heavy repetition. It's quite good. Except for a deconstructed version of Billie Holiday's "The Man I Love", I don't understand any of the words (I think she's singing in French, sometimes) but she has a fine voice and the music is great, so it's still a nice listen.
    Four raquos : » » » »

  • Andrew Bird - Noble Beast. I'm still waiting for this to grab me. It feels low on hooks and high on mellow. I can't bring myself to rate it.
  • Update, also: The Fratellis - Flathead EP. Do you like the new punk-esque sounds of the Hives, the Vines, Artic Monkeys, etc? Well, you might like The Fratellis, too.

Coraline

It's official: if Tim Burton and Henry Selick make a movie together, I'll love it. Like "James and the Giant Peach" and "Nightmare Before Christmas" already are, "Coraline" is certain to end up near the top of my Favorite Movies Ever list.

"Coraline" shares the same whimsically-demented, decayed, spiral-infested, stop-motion animation as the other two, but takes it into absolutely eye-popping levels. In the middle of the movie where Coraline is first exploring the Other world, especially, it's visually astounding. The mouse circus and the garden scene in particular had me laughing in awe. So many beautiful things moving around at once is almost overwhelming. And it's definitely the kind of thing that's improved by the big screen.

The story is good, too !

Well worth the $7.

Vaccinations and Autism

There is no link. And there never was:

THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.

Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.

(via)

Cowboy Junkies, Lincoln Theater

We saw the Cowboy Junkies, Saturday night at the Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh. We forgot to grab a camera, so I have no proof of this - you'll just have to take my word for it, this time.

Not surprisingly, they played a set of long slow songs about loss, longing, death and melancholy, wistful bittersweet and bleak defeat. But nobody can do a slow sad waltz like the Cowboy Junkies - and nobody else should even try to do 90 minutes worth. The songs don't mope, they ache. They don't scream, they sigh. The music is nearly hypnotic and Margot Timmins' voice is smooth and calm; the whole thing becomes dreamlike, meditative.

Or maybe that's just because I was insanely hungover from my wife's birthday party, the night before.

Either way, they sounded great. And Margot Timmins' voice sounds just as good today as it did on their debut, 24 years ago.

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Looks like the spring concert season is in full swing right now. We currently have tickets to see:

  1. John Pizzarelli
  2. Modest Mouse
  3. Anthony Bourdain
  4. Neko Case
  5. Robyn Hitchcock
  6. Fleetwood Mac

And I'm tempted to go see ...Trail Of Dead, Son Volt, Rev Horton Heat... and many others. Whew.