I cannot impress on you just how giant the scoreboard is in Kansas City’s stadium. (Click on the picture to get the full size.)
When Garth Brooks appears on this thing to tell the local fans about whatever Garth Brooks and Kansas Citians discuss, it is a truly awesome sight, like God coming down to speak to the masses directly.
This is the second of the two samplers I picked up at SXSW a few years ago outside the +/- show we couldn’t get into. It’s a shame I reviewed the first one almost 2.5 years earlier since this one is 2.5 lunchboxes better.
This is a sampler album, but it almost coheres. In fact, it coheres so well that my second-biggest complaint is that it’s a bit monochromatic and some of the bands are tough to distinguish from each other. But it’s hard to state your personality with one song. My biggest complaint would be that the sound quality is peaky throughout, making listening for the entire 75 minutes quite fatiguing.
My third-biggest complaint is that there are two pieces of knock-you-over-the-head-with-a-three-note-hook pieces of trash on here. But even those two, “Hallelujah The Hills” by the band of the same name and “Sunrise” by Marshmallow Coast have their almost-redeeming moments throughout.
The album starts with its best song, “Our Haunt” by Palomar. Except for that peaky sound quality problem I mentioned, I love everything about it: the vocals, the melody, the musical explosions, all of it.
“Another Day (And Yoor Still Knocked Out)” by Evangelicals starts so abrasively chaotic that no matter how loud I have the disc when it comes on, it has to get turned down. It’s just too much, but in one of the disc’s biggest surprises comes back to redeem itself. It’s hard to enjoy this band given the horrors their name conjures up, so it’s really saying something about how good this song turns out to be that I like it as much as I do.
“Bodies And Minds” by Great Lake Swimmers and South San Gabriel’s “I Feel Too Young To Die” both flit back and forth between keepers and non. In the final shakeout, the latter is simply fine but nothing special while the former’s high points are enough to warrant the space it consumes.
Speaking of flitting, Mendoza Line’s “Catch A Collapsing Star” is a Wilco-via-Bob-Dylan-y thing that flits back and forth between mixer and keeper depending on…you know…I have no idea, but my notes on this one are completely schizophrenic in that regard. So we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and make it a candidate.
That song leads into a fantastic stretch that is the magic of sampler CDs when they coalesce into awesomeness for several songs. Will Johnson’s “Just To Know What You’ve Been Dreaming,” “Fire Engine On Fire, Pt. 2” by Flotation Toy Warning, and “Mountain Laurel” by Shearwater all consistently compete for the honor of the CD’s second best track. Flotation Toy Warning even beautifully employs a theremin, an impressive feat given that the theremin is that weird instrument used in old sci-fi movies that basically just sounds like old sci-fi movies everywhere but here.
Shearwater’s lead singer reinforces my preference for gorgeous male voices. With the amazing amount of male voices in rock these days, it’s amazing that mediocrity like Fleet Foxes gets pumped the way they do. If you want harmonies, try The Beach Boys or Galactic Cowboys, both of whom do it much better.
Near the end Saint Thomas brings “Strangers Out Of The Blue,” a very Neil Young-esque tune. In fact, I even Binged “Strangers Out Of Blue” to find out if it was a Neil Young song, but instead came upon this sad website:
This is a fanpage dedicated to the Norwegian artist St. Thomas, also known as Thomas Hansen, born in Oslo on February 13th 1976. Battling with addictions, and self-medicating his own inner demons, Thomas was sadly found passed away in his Oslo apartment on September 10th 2007.
The album goes from that tragic evocation into a weird sound-collage ending by Bablicon entitled “Bahamut.” My initial reaction was that it was another example of recording being too easy if people can just plop down sounds with no artistic statement to feel deep, but after a while a song does emerge…not quite enough to warrant keeping it on my DMP, but it’s decent.
Which brings us back to my third biggest complaint, which is that there are two awful songs on here and two more that don’t quite get over the keeping barrier. But you’ve got to expect some trash on a sampler. If this had been a disc by an artist, my complaints may have combined to keep it at four lunchboxes. Given the format’s handicaps, though, this is a pretty solid 4.5 lunchboxes
Rating:
Mixers: “Our Haunt” (Palomar), “Flor De Leis” (Slow Dazzle), “Catch A Collapsing Star” (Mendoza Line), “Just To Know What You’ve Been Dreaming” (Will Johnson), “Fire Engine On Fire, Pt. 2” (Flotation Toy Warning), “Mountain Laurel” (Shearwater), “Strangers Out Of The Blue” (St. Thomas)
Non-keepers: “Hallelujah The Hills” (Hallelujah The Hills), “I Feel Too Young To Die” (South San Gabriel), “Sunrise” (Marshmallow Coast), “Bahamut” (Bablicon)
Filed Between: Muddy Waters (King Bee) and Weezer (the blue album)
For an explanation of what’s going on, you can start tracing back the re-stating of the vows tradition with last year’s post.
This year we went camping near Cle Elum, a city 80 miles east of here that gets 300 days of sun a year where we’re considering getting some property. Well, we were going to go camping but every campsite was filled so we ended up at a resort. It was like Frasier and Lillith go camping.
Anyway, here is the public re-statement of my wedding vows. This year’s addition is in bold.
Baby,
I promise you that I will always be the things that made you fall in love with me: honest and transparent, funny and witty, open-minded and creative, adoring.
I promise you i will never stop pampering and courting you.
I promise you will always be my muse, and I will draw daily inspiration from you. I promise to return the favor by trying to inspire you daily.
I promise to work on being a better husband: to talk to you, to tell you what I’m feeling, and to engage in continual self-evaluation.
I promise to prioritize us, without sacrificing you or me. I promise to always make room for us in my life, and to make sure you know when I think we need to adjust to get to the right level of us in both of our lives.
I promise to try to love the things about you that are just in your nature, such as the telltale hair monster left behind everywhere you’ve been.
I promise to make a fuss over you when you’re sick, to love you and support you and take your side when you’ve had a bad day. I promise to listen to you tell me about your bad day and to refrain from giving you unsolicited solutions.
I promise that I will do my best to learn how we are as one, and to take into account how my mood and actions affect you.
I promise to try to recover quickly from disagreements. I promise to do my best to stay on the high road. And I promise to forgive and forget mistakes said and done in the heat of the moment.
I promise to be stubbornly filled with determined, creative solutions to the most gridlocked, vexing situations we encounter
I promise you that I will help you and support you to achieve your dreams. And I promise that, with your support, I will pursue my mine as well. I promise never to stop taking new risks and adventures with you.
I promise you physical, emotional, and mental fidelity. I promise that you will always be my baby that i adore completely with my mind, body, and soul, and i promise to trust that you adore me as well.
I promise to be vigilant in never letting you forget that you are the most wonderful, most beautiful woman in the world. i promise to set the husband you, as the most wonderful, beautiful woman in the world, deserve, as the impossible ideal i will strive to be.
And above all, baby, I promise to be always on your team. And I will do my best to make our team the envy of every other team at the party of life.
What a great way to bring people to the table….
The folks in Newport, Oregon, that’s who.
Probably the busiest week of the quarter this week, exacerbated by the fact that I actually tried to enjoy myself over the holiday weekend instead of “getting things done.” I went to the Melvins/Green River show and then My Baby and I went to the surprisingly sunny Oregon coast and took a cruise in Oregon’s fourth largest estuary.
I did want to update you that my “internship problem” has been solved. I’ll be working for one of the faculty members over the summer as an RA. So it’s not really an internship per se, but it can count as one. In addition, I’m planning to start work on a thesis this summer that I hope I can wrap up in the fall with my final class and get my degree in December.
That’s the rough plan. We’ll see.
They take their open mics seriously in Boise.
Even a crappy phone picture of this wondrous chocolate fountain in Vegas is enough to give me a hard-on.
Pictures of me and My Baby taken in the ass of the mirror-paneled horse in the lobby of the Bellagio.
From Granville Island in Vancouver….
With My Baby’s hand in there for a sense of scale.
Are these from a cow?