Music
drorzel | December 6, 2007With the department secretary switching over to the all-Christmas-songs station, and Jason Hare and Jeff Giles celebrating holiday tunes that bring the suck, it seems like a good time to re-ask the eternal question:
Are there Christmas songs that can hold their own against "Fairytale of New York"?
Or, more to the point, name me some holiday-themed songs that don't suck. I got the list up to 21 songs last year, thanks in large part to Jeff Giles's now-vanished jefitoblog, but it would be nice to expand that, if suitable songs can be found.
drorzel | November 18, 2007I've been thinking off and on all day about the Jon Sobel post I mentioned in the previous post. I think he's got a point, but something about it strikes me as slightly off. To get this out of my system, I'm going to babble about it a bit here, and see if anything coherent emerges.
Sobel's jumping-off point is the fact that thrity-year-old music is still used at sporting events and in tv commercials, which he finds amazing given the origin of the form:
If you had told me, back in the 1970s when I was in high school, that the records my friends and I were playing at our parties would still be…
drorzel | November 18, 2007Following on yesterday's post about books, I started thinking about the best pop music for the year. Since getting iTunes, I've been able to do this quasi-scientifically, by putting together playlists of the top-rated songs for the year, which provides an easy guide to what I liked best. My first impression, thinking back, was that this was kind of a weak year, and the four- and five-star playlists for the year confirm it.
I initially had only ten songs on the five-star playlist, and while reconsideration of the four-star list managed to bump that up to 18, that's still the lowest by far of…
drorzel | November 16, 2007Kate and I went to see Bruce Springsteen last night in Albany. The show was listed as starting at 7:30, but it was 8:25 before the band took the stage. At about 9:30, they were playing "Devil's Arcade," one of the slower and more political songs off the new record, which gave me time to look at my watch. "Huh," I said. "Must be getting near the end of the set."
They finished "Devil's Arcade," and went into "The Rising." "Well," I thought while singing along, "This is a good song to end the set on." They finished, and went right into "Last to Die." "Bold call, ending on a track from the new…
drorzel | November 9, 2007Having done a giant weighty physics post, I feel like I should post something more frivolous, so here's something about music...
I recently purchased a bunch of stuff from iTunes (yeah, yeah, Amazon has DRM-free MP3's, blah blah, blah. 1) I had a gift card, and 2) I'm not Cory Doctorow), and there was a weird sort of theme to the purchases: new releases by guys whose previous bands I like:
Bill Janovitz and Crown Victoria, Fireworks on TV. The singer and guitarist from Buffalo Tom, playing with a bar band from Boston. This is the best of the lot, and sounds pretty much like a lost Buffalo Tom…
drorzel | October 24, 2007One of the odd things about blogdom, and the commentariat in general, is the way that people will all seem to latch on to some particular idea at about the same time, despite the lack of any obvious connection between them. I keep having days when I scan through my RSS feeds, and find the same topics coming up again and again.
This week's emergent theme seems to be "Kids These Days." It started with this deeply silly complaint about the "whiteness" of indie music by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker, which strikes me as a classic example of a writer straining to find deep cultural meaning…
drorzel | October 8, 2007In the "You Learn Something New Every Day" file, I was double-checking some dates for the Many Worlds chapter, when I ran across the following at the end of the Wikipedia page for Hugh Everett III:
Everett's son, Mark Oliver Everett, is also known as "E", the lead singer and songwriter for the band Eels.
Huh. I did not know that. But it's on Wikipedia, so it must be true...
Anyway, I don't really have anything substantive to say about this, so here's a fan video for my favorite Eels song:
I couldn't find an official version of that. Here's an official video for another song off Shootenanny…
drorzel | October 7, 2007The title sounds like the opening to a really odd joke, but in fact it was the concert bill last night in Albany. Bob Dylan is touring as always, and Elvis Costello is along doing a solo set, with Amos Lee opening for both. Kate and I went to the show, and it was... unusual.
I'll put most of the review comments below the fold, just to avoid cluttering the front page more than it already is. I think the key realization of the evening, though, was that at age 66, Dylan has decided that he wants to be Johnny Cash circa 1968.
What with one thing and another, we were a little late getting there,…
drorzel | October 5, 2007I picked up three new albums from iTunes last weekend (yes, I know, you can buy DRM-free MP3's from Amazon now, but I have some iTunes credit to use up, and I haven't steeled myself to download and install the necessary application yet, which I just know is going to irritate me). The three were:
Reunion Tour by the Weakerthans
Under the Blacklight by Rilo Kiley
Challengers by the New Pornographers
I have to say, I was at least a little disappointed in all of these.
Reunion Tour probably fared the best of the lot, as my reaction is basically "Well, it's no Reconstruction Site..." But…
drorzel | September 26, 2007I had a 9pm intramural hoops game last night (the other team didn't show, so we won by forfeit, but it still pushed bedtime back a bit), and I have an 8am meeting today, not to mention the beginning of a nasty head cold that is turning my brain to cotton wool. Sounds like a good day for a shuffle-play post.
Below the fold, a good run of songs from the four-and-five-star playlist last night, to allow you to poke fun at my taste in pop music.
"Happy Birthday To Me," Cracker
"Always The Last To Know," Del Amitri
"Whenever God Shines His Light," Van Morrison
"Painless Life," Slender Means
"See…
drorzel | September 25, 2007It's been over a month since I last hit iTunes for new music, which is a long time for me. I'm going to be going on a mini buying spree tonight, so I have a simple question for my musically inclined readers:
What albums from the last couple of months should I be getting at iTunes?
I know there's a new Rilo Kiley, and a new New Pornographers, but I'm sure there are other essential albums that I need to buy. So what are they?
drorzel | September 16, 2007One of my favorite underappreciated bands of the mid-90's is the Boston-based three-piece Buffalo Tom. They got a little bit of play with songs like "Sodajerk" and "Treehouse" (both of which have turned up in commercials, and the former apparently figured prominently in an epsidoe of "My So-Called Life"), but they had a string of three terrific albums (Let Me Come Over, Big Red Letter Day, and Sleepy Eyed) that just never got the recognition they deserved. Of course, I say this in part because their characteristic sound-- chiming guitars, rolling drums, slightly cryptic lyrics-- plays to all…
bergman | September 1, 2007Taking a break from all this physics, I thought I'd talk a little about music and some related mathematical coincidences. One of the fundamental concepts of music is that of consonance and dissonance. Consonant things sound nice when played together and dissonant things do not. For example, if you play two Cs together on a piano (or your instrument of choice), it's a pleasing sound, but playing a C and an F# together sound unpleasant.
It could have been the case that what we find pleasing and displeasing on this simple level could be purely random, but our tastes align with a very elementary…
bergman | August 29, 2007Since I have control over this blog for a little while (and where is my co-guest blogger anyways?), I figure I ought to use it in my own self-interest. Towards that end, the Austin City Limits music festival is coming up soon, and, as usual, I only recognize a small portion of the bands playing. What should I go see? The lineup is here, and the schedule is here, here and here.
Right now I'm leaning twoards penciling in The Killers in the vain hope that they can pull off a decent live show, The Ike Reilly Assassination, Andrew Bird, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arcade Fire, Regina Spektor, The…
drorzel | August 9, 2007Blogging will continue to be relatively light for the next few weeks, as I'm currently in a sort of Vacation Interregnum-- as you can tell from the picture posts, we just got back from the Virgin Islands, and at the end of next week, we're heading to Japan for three weeks of tourism and Worldcon. Also, I'm still catching up on stuff that happened when I was out of town last week.
As a child of the 80's, though, I can't let jefitoblog's new project pass by without comment: for the month of August, he's posting a Power Ballad of the Day. Notable songs to date include "The Flame" by Cheap Trick…
drorzel | July 22, 2007The random pla feature on my iPod coughed up Warren Zevon's cover of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" this morning, which got me wondering. I own at least four different versions of that song (Dylan, Clapton, Zevon, G'n'R), and iTunes offers over a hundred different versions (not counting the twenty-odd different takes by Dylan himself). There are also a hundred-ish cover versions of "All Along the Watchtower" listed. Those have to be his two most-covered songs, and they're probably up there in the race for most-covered song of all time.
I wonder what Bob Dylan thinks of that, given that they're…
drorzel | July 13, 2007"Darkmatter," Andrew Bird
"21st Century (Digital Boy)," Bad Religion
"Some Fantastic," Barenaked Ladies
"Desolation Row," Bob Dylan
"Total Eclipse of the Heart," Bonnie Tyler
"Gravity Fails," the Bottle Rockets
"Protons, Neutrons, Electrons," The Cat Empire
"Alien," Chris Whitley
"Under the Milky Way," the Church
"White Russian Galaxy," the Crimea
"Ziggy Stardust," David Bowie
"Monkey to Man," Elvis Costello
"Laser Show," Fountains of Wayne
"I Am a Scientist," Guided by Voices
"Satellite," Guster
"Galileo," Indigo Girls
"The Future Soon," Jonathan Coulton
"Satellite of Love," Lou Reed
"Elvis…
drorzel | July 9, 2007Another pop-culture question for the audience: Jason Hare, in the course of recapping a Top Ten from 1985 makes a shrewd observation:
"Sussudio" was a damn catchy song in 1985 and while nobody will admit to liking it now, I guarantee you that once an indie band covers it, Stereogum will lose their shit.
So, the question is, who should cover it? I'm not going to be terribly strict about the "indie" classification, as I have trouble keeping track of who has sold out these days, so let's leave it open:
Some band working today is going to cover Phil Collins's "Sussudio," and it's going to be…
drorzel | July 8, 2007An insane audiophile of my acquaintance recently remarked (in a locked LiveJournal, otherwise I'd link to it) that while live classical music is clearly superior to recorded classical music, it's crazy to go to a live performance of pop music because "you're not hearing actual instruments/voices, you're hearing them miked and amplified through speakers just like you would at home," and if speakers are going to be involved, you might as well not be there. This is space-alien logic, of course, but not all that far out there as insane audiophilia goes. Remember, kids, friends don't let friends…