2009. Seriously. two thousand f’ing nine. How the hell did that happen?
Not only that, we’re damn near a third of the way through 2009. It’s almost May.
Also, Wednesday? How the hell is it already Wednesday?
We’re not even quite four weeks into the quarter and I’m already overwhelmed. My Baby and I also have two weekends out of town planned in the remaining seven weeks, further straining my time during the week. And so I’m strongly leaning towards putting MPL on extended hiatus for the first time since I started writing regularly in 2005, unless you count the roughly four weeks I took off for our honeymoon in 2006.
I’ve been busy before, and have always kept MPL going. Part of that is because it is a nice ritual that keeps me sane. It also keeps my friends updated on what’s going on with me, which makes catching up with them much more efficient. Additionally, I’m always listening to new music, so writing about it is just a part of that. But it takes a few hours each week to give each CD the attention it deserves (and oftentimes much more than it deserves) and write about it. It also makes me less productive to listen to new music that I don’t like. So I think I might just put the new music thing on the back burner, too, and pick that up again after the quarter.
Anyway, things might slow down significantly here for a while. I have some stuff planned for the next few weeks, and you can be sure that if there is any relevant update in the Minnesota Senate “race,” I’ll post about it a few weeks after it happens, but if you don’t want to check back in every day while I’m going slow, know that I plan to ramp back up again in mid-June, after my final project is due.
S/he would have to.
The Irish Brigade is a duo of native Irishmen who now ply their trade via the Midwest interstate, doing turns in the Twin Cities, Omaha, and St. Louis. I saw them at least a couple of times at St. Paul’s Half Time Rec and remember enjoying myself but also being kind of worn out on Irish music after an hour or so.
This CD is about 56 minutes, so I’m not tired of it by the time it finishes, but it’s still pretty ‘meh.’ The liner notes don’t have many details, but I get the feeling this is rich with original compositions and short on the traditional Irish canon I remember from their shows. That may have something to do with the meh, or it may be that these guys just thrive on a drunk, participative crowd. Either way, once you get past the mixers and keepers, it’s enjoyable but flat at its best (“Jigs,” “Black Is The Colour”) and downright aggravating at its worst (“Westmeath Bachelor” and “The Voyage”). The fidelity is fantastic.
Rating:
Mixers: none
Keepers: “Rose Marie,” “Barleycorn And Reel Tarbolton,” “Lonesome Boatman,” “Boolevogue And Reels,” “Home Away From Home”
Filed Between: International Pop Underground Convention and Iron And Wine (The Shepherd’s Dog)
So, you might remember that Al Franken beat Norm Coleman for one of Minnesota’s Senate seats. Thanks to funding from Washington Republicans, Franken still hasn’t been seated due to Coleman’s appeals.
To recap, Coleman was up by a mere 215 votes on election night, triggering an automatic recount. Coleman said that if we were in Franken’s shoes he would concede because “the healing process is so impoatant.” Screw that noise, Franken said. After the recount, during which Coleman tried to keep votes from being counted, Franken was up by 225 and declared the victor.
Then Coleman, despite his earlier rhetoric, appealed. And, naturally, during the court appeal reversed course and tried to get some 4,000+ rejected ballots counted. The court decided that 351 of them had been, indeed, improperly rejected. So they were opened and counted. The results? Franken 198, Coleman 111, Other 42 (there was a strong third-party candidate in this election, as there has been in most statewide elections in Minnesota since Ventura’s success). So now Franken leads by 312. Nice appeal there, Normie.
Of course, Coleman is taking the appeal to the state Supreme Court while 63% of Minnesotans say he should concede and newspapers that endorsed him during the campaign are calling on him to do the same.
To those ends, the DNC is asking supporters to post these fliers all over the state. Here’s my part:
Coleman has never done anything good. St. Paul was a miserable, miserable place under his reign as mayor, making its fantastic comebackas a place you would actually want to go only after he left. He lost in the gubenatorial race to Jesse Ventura, then served as Bush’s lap dog in the Senate for years. His accomplishments amount to zilch…how he has risen this far in life is beyond me. Thankfully he won’t be around much longer.
We have a bit of an ant problem. They’ve nested in our home and come out every spring as soon as the sun starts to show itself for more than a few minutes per day.
Every year it’s the same pattern. We buy traps and spray a little. The number of live ants just increases, but so does the number of dead ants falling out of our vents and lying dead on our floor. After a while we decide that we’d rather just live with ants than continue to spray poison around our kitchen.
But every year the ants get worse and worse.
The other day I looked over on my shoulder and saw this guy’s final resting place.
This CD turns me into those comedy/tragedy theater masks. It makes me so happy because it’s good, fast, guitar-drenched pop music with great lyrics, but it also makes me sad because it’s a travesty that bands this good can go their whole existence without being noticed. It was a while before I was even able to find them on the Internet. They’re not these guys. Nor these guys. Here they are. Or maybe the bright side is that there are still undiscovered gems like this out there, just waiting to brighten up my life when I stumble upon them, content to play awesome music to people around their hometown and never try to make it more than a hobby
Poppy guitar hooks are clearly becoming my weakness, as almost all of the CDs I adore now fit that mold. I’m not sure why more bands don’t go for this aesthetic, because when it is done well it’s quite clearly the most perfect way to manipulate air molecules…and blood molecules, as I can distinctly feel them rush into my penis when I hear music this good.
Maybe it’s not done often because it’s really hard to do well. Or maybe because the bands that do it well, like The Cutters, Vampire Weekend, and Airborne Toxic Event, do it so damned well that it’s not even worth trying to add to the conversation unless you can be at that level. I mean, the hooks are so perfect, so timeless, that if you set out to write music like The Cutters, you’d just come off as a sorry imitation because with hooks like this, that sound like they must have been competing with The Beach Boys for their place at the top of the charts. They sound so perfect that it’s impossible to escape them, and if you tried to write tunes while hopped on these, you’d just end up writing the same thing because why mess with perfection. I’m coming to the conclusion that true musical brilliance is finding those remaining pop hooks that haven’t been written yet. Hearing some band still do it, though, gives me hope that Schoenberg was right that there really is so much great music left to be written in C major.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, to read in the liner notes that Danny Heifetz of Mr. Bungle played percussion on this album and co-produced it. Brilliance attracts brilliance. (Note: It actually might be a different guy since his name is spelled “Heifitz” in two places in the liner notes, but I find that too strong a coincidence.)
Do yourself a favor and buy both of the band’s CDs for sixteen dollars. I will be shortly. You can also download some mp3s. Start with the powerful “Counting Cars,” which is about a few seconds shy of being the Best Song Ever and go from there to the vindictive “Get It Wrong.” Celebrating some asshole’s death has never sounded so good. Then move to a couple more adventurous tracks, like “Out Tonight,” which features what sounds like a bomb as an instrument at the beginning, and their tribute to what I’m guessing was a major influence, Buddy Holly’s “Everyday,” which they imbue with a spooky, uncomfortable vibe with some low-frequency sounds in the background.
This is my new favorite album and new favorite band. I’m not sure whether to be happy about that or to be sad that I’ll almost certainly never see them play live.
Rating:
Mixers: “Out Tonight,” “Sunday Sunday Sunday,” “Counting Cars,” “Li Li,” “Get It Wrong”
Non-keepers: “Veruca Salt,” “Where In The World”
Filed Between: Curse Of The Golden Vampire (Mass Destruction) and Cutting Through – Columbia Hard Music sampler
With this two-disc, thirty-song compilation of film composer Ennio Morricone’s early work, my 2005 Ipecac collection is complete, save the non-Collectors Edition of Fantômas’ Suspended Animation, of which I own the Collectors Edition. Along with Messer Chups, this album has the label brining their worst year to date to a close with a couple of 3.5-lunchbox releases…the high points of their year.
You may not know Ennio Morricone by name, but it’s likely you’ve heard his work before. He’s most famous for scoring Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, like A Fistful Of Dollars and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, and he’s also done several modern films like The Mission and The Untouchables.
As you would expect, a compilation like this lacks cohesion. These pieces were all composed to accompany Italian films between 1968 and 1974 (plus an outlier in 1981), not each other, and so any review of this album as an album is a bit unfair. The music here is very heady, artsy, and challenging. There are a lot of things on here that are very cool, but are not necessarily something you’d want to listen to casually. There’s a wide variety of sounds, including psychedelic guitar, a splurky free-jazz trumpet, a string quartet interspersed with militant marching, organ, bizarre percussion sounds, a synthesized tuba, and at least three tracks that feature a woman having an erotic experience.
Despite all that variety, there are still sections of the album where it bogs down into a swamp of indistinguishability. Compiler Alan Bishop seems to have an affinity for tracks that feature high, held, screechy violins, as that sound constitutes the majority of the tracks that have little to nothing to say here. And do we really need three different female orgasm tracks? I mean, I love the sound of a woman getting off, but it’s not something I want to listen to when I’m on the bus or doing homework, two of my main music-listening activities.
The liner notes deserve special mention, as they are glorious. Glossy, colorful, and capturing scenes from the films whose scores are featured here, they paint a picture of Italian film that lies beyond intriguing. Whether it’s a topless woman kissing two men in front of a backdrop of war planes (Forza G), a nude woman on all fours painted in yellow and black spots from head-to-toe (Veruschka (Poesia Di Una Donna)), or a caged woman in a circle of robed priests (L’Antricristo), it all adds up to me needing to see more Italian film.
In fact, this is a borderline three-lunchbox CD, but the fabulous liner notes and the Best Song Ever, “Un Uomo Da Rispettare (Titoli),” strongly assert that this collection has safely earned its extra half-lunchbox.
Rating:
Best Song Ever: “Un Uomo Da Rispettare (Titoli)”
Mixers: “Rapimento In Campo Aperto,” “Ninna Nanna Per Adulteri,” “Trafelato,” “Sequenza 10”
Keepers: “Giorno Di Notte,” “Ricreazione Divertita,” “Seguita,” “Postludio Alla Terza Moglie,” “Il Buio,” “Le Fotografie”
Filed Between: Morphine (Like Swimming) and Van Morrison (Astral Weeks)
Beckers reported never-snow for at least 5 minutes in Kent on 4/1/09. I say it was God saying, “April Fools, you live in Seattle.”
That same day, Learning To Sequence reported that it snowed “all morning” about 8 miles north of MPL HQ:
So despite not getting any never-snow at MPL HQ on April 1st, we were surrounded by it to the north and south, so we’re counting it. That’s number 16 on the season.
In that same post, Learning To Sequence also reported the coldest March on record, which would mean that in the roughly three years I’ve lived here, I’ve experienced the rainiest month ever (November 2006) and the coldest March ever.
KOMO News, though, reports it was actually it was the coldest march since ‘76. I was born in ‘74, so that’s kind of like “ever.” It also reports that with the April 1st never-snow that it was Seattle’s 6th-snowiest [sic] season on record at 23.3″ I know 23.3″ isn’t a lot of snow for a place like, say, Minneapolis, but it is a f**k of a lot of never-snow. You try living amid 23.3″ of never-snow that they don’t move off of the streets.
Astute readers might have noted that last Sunday, with its traditional Opening Night game, came and went without me posting my predictions of the final standings, something I’ve done since 2006.
I’ve kind of burned out on baseball. I still like it, and I had the game on that night, I’ve already sworn loudly at a Twins game this season, and I’ll watch more than my share this season. But out of necessity I dove into school, work, and finding a job this offseason and didn’t have time to follow it. Not surprisingly, the offseason went by much less painfully than it usually does. In addition, my RSS reader blew up on me some time back and I never added back my baseball feeds…I never really got an inkling to, either.
Ironically, the same thing that drew me in strongly to baseball in the early part of this decade, the analytical writing in the baseball blogosphere, is exactly what tended to suck the excitement out of the game for me. First, there’s just too much content out there. Even if you just narrow it down to my two fave Mariners and two fave Twins bloggers…man, I have other stuff to do. Secondly, it’s all so negative (and I realize I am totally the pot calling the kettle black here), getting way too worked up over this move or that decision…gnashing teeth over such little consequence. Third, it’s too analytical. Whatever, I respect the work they’re doing, but we blew past the 80/20 rule six years ago, and we’re just niggling at the edges now. If you have to do linear regression in order to come up with a number that measures a player’s worth, then by definition that measure is too unintuitive to me for it to add to my enjoyment of the game. I’ll be here with my broad strokes, thank you very much, enjoying the game in my way.
There’s more to this, like the fact that baseball season, in the past, upset me more than the offseason because, despite being able to watch some baseball, I was almost constantly distressed that there was baseball on and my schedule wasn’t allowing me to watch it. I could go on and on, but I don’t really care to analyze it too deeply and I doubt you want to hear about it that much. I’m just saying, me and baseball, we’re still f**king, but we’re seeing other people.