{"id":10286,"date":"2010-09-16T13:47:22","date_gmt":"2010-09-16T17:47:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=10286"},"modified":"2010-09-16T13:47:22","modified_gmt":"2010-09-16T17:47:22","slug":"listening-to-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=10286","title":{"rendered":"Listening To..."},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><b>Wye Oak - The Knot<\/b>. Recently, the A.V. Club ran a series called \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.avclub.com\/articles\/introduction-to-av-undercover,38989\/\">A.V. Undercover<\/a>\", in which they chose 25 songs from various bands and invited 25 bands to pick a song and then do a cover of it, live, in the A.V. Club's little round studio. It was mostly pretty good, though a few bands suffered because their singers just don't have the chops to sing songs outside of their own style. Wye Oak, a two-piece drum-n-guitar band, did The Kinks \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.avclub.com\/articles\/the-kinks,38871\/\">Strangers<\/a>\", and did a very nice job of it. So, I bought this record. And I love it.\n<p>Their songs sometimes sound like the nodding narcotic fuzz of Codeine, and the singer's voice can't help but draw Cat Power comparisons. But they really have their own sound: spare and slow, alternating between delicate and pounding, a touch of dark country twang, bits of dissonance; pretty, but wistful and lonely. <\/p>\n<p>Right now, you can hear the whole thing for free on <a href=\"http:\/\/mergerecords.com\/store\/store_detail.php?catalog_id=619\">Merge's website<\/a>. My favorite songs so far are \"Siamese\" and \"I Want For Nothing\".<\/p>\n<p>4 laquos: &laquo;&laquo;&laquo;&laquo;<\/p>\n<li><b>The Antlers - Hospice<\/b>. This is another band I found on the A.V. Club's Undercover series. They bravely covered Pink Floyd's \"Wish You Were Here\", and I liked their cover enough to give their record a chance. Sadly, I'm having a harder time getting into this one than I did with Wye Oak's record, even though I keep playing it in my car - trying to get it to click. But it hasn't.\n<p>A lot of it is very quiet and slow moving, even more than Wye Oak. High, thin vocals singing slight melodies, barely above a whisper, usually far quieter than the surrounding instruments. Not a lot of hooks in those parts. And the parts that aren't quiet sound like <i>motherfucking Arcade Fire<\/i> songs. Which makes me want to change the CD as quick as I can because I'm <i>so fucking sick<\/i> of motherfucking bands that sound like <i>motherfucking Arcade Fire<\/i>! <\/p>\n<p>Fuck, people, there are a million good bands out there you can rip off, why does everyone feel the need to sound exactly like this one middling fucking Canadian band ? <\/p>\n<p>fuck!<\/p>\n<p>FUCK!<\/p>\n<p>2 laquos: &laquo;&laquo;<\/p>\n<li><b>Tom Waits - Rain Dogs<\/b>. My first Tom Waits record! I ignored him for 35 years, but finally decided to take a look. And now I'll never be able to watch another Tim Burton animated movie without thinking all the songs were written by or for Tom Waits - it's that drunken, creaky, dirty, early jazz sound. When Waits sings, I see a big-mouthed skeleton in a bowler hat, singing into a microphone made from a legbone topped with a rat's rib cage; a zombie plays piano; a one-eyed monster serves drinks.\n<p>I could grow to really like this, or I could get bored; It's hard to say. I do like a lot of the songs - the more stylized ones more than the straightforward ones. I'm just not sure if I can suspend disbelief enough to really get into Waits' crazy drunken hobo character once the novelty wears off. Time will tell.<\/p>\n<p>3 laquos: &laquo;&laquo;&laquo;\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wye Oak - The Knot. Recently, the A.V. Club ran a series called \"A.V. Undercover\", in which they chose 25 songs from various bands and invited 25 bands to pick a song and then do a cover of it, live, in the A.V. Club's little round studio. It was mostly pretty good, though a few [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}