Tag: Music

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Everyone Round Here Lives In Silence

At some point, I stopped discovering new music.

Once upon a time, doing that was easy. I was young and in the UK in the 1990s; I just listened to Radio 1 all day, through the Britpop daytime and into the evening Evening Sessions, Mark And Lard, John Peel, whatever. New music came to me that way, or during the weekly weekend trips to record stores where I’d buy singles based on their cover artwork or how strange a band’s name seemed.

A decade later, and it was the era of the mp3 blog, an online network of friends I’d never met sharing the sounds they’d discovered for themselves and gotten excited about. It wasn’t the same as before; it was slower and less passive, but I discovered a number of favorite acts that way. (Curiously, most of them being solo female performers; I don’t know whether that was a bias on my part, or the bloggers.)

Now, I rarely find new things. Perhaps it’s my age, or that delivery systems have changed again. (I’m on Spotify, I promise; I just rarely use their Daily Mixes or whatever.) I find myself reading reviews of things and then searching them out, instead of things finding me with the lucky happenstance of before. Occasionally, it still happens — I’ll hear something by chance and have that What was that, I have to hear more response — and it’s especially thriling when it does, now. But for the most part, I’ve stopped discovering new music.

It’s something I miss, dearly.

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You Can Tell a Lot About Someone by the Type of Music They Listen to

You Can Tell a Lot About Someone by the Type of Music They Listen to

digital-femme:

Hit shuffle on your iPod, phone, iTunes, media player, etc. Write down the first twenty songs. Then pass this onto ten people. No skipping!

I was tagged by fyeahlilbit3point0:

I’m tagging everybody.

Okay, into this. So:

  1. Carry the Can – Super Furry Animals
  2. New York is Killing Me – Gil Scott Heron
  3. Devil’s Pie – Rhymefest
  4. Title of This Song – Portland Cello Project feat. Lizzy Ellison
  5. Darklands – Primal Scream
  6. Gospel with No Lord – Camille
  7. Yen on a Carousel – David Holmes
  8. Bird’s Lament – Moondog
  9. Rehab – Amy Winehouse
  10. Feeling Good – Nina Simone
  11. Old Brown Shoe – The Beatles
  12. Everyday Robots – Damon Albarn
  13. The Bridge I Burned – Elvis Costello
  14. Life is Just Beginning – The Creation
  15. Way Down in the Hole – The Blind Boys of Alabama
  16. Downs (Demo) – Big Star
  17. Gotta Get Up – Harry Nilsson
  18. Anger Management – Shawn Lee (feat. Princess Superstar)
  19. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome – Mary Lou Lord
  20. Hot Knife – Fiona Apple

Like Cheryl, anyone who wants to respond, feel free.

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What was the first concert you ever went to? What was the best concert you ever want to?

bigredrobot:

Oh man, this is a tough one. I think my first concert experience was when my dad drove us out to the desert behind the Silver Bowl to listen to the audio bleed from the US concert from their Zoo TV tour. Which, according to the internet, would’ve been in November of 1992. It was a kind of a magic experience, sitting in the back of my dad’s Bronco, listening to the songs echo across the desert at night. This was Achtung Baby-era, before U2 had completely crawled up their own collective ass to fester and die.

The first “real” concert is a little trickier to pin down. I’m thinking it was this Pearl Jam show from 1993, where a group of us drove from the Las Vegas desert to the California desert to see them on an old polo grounds. I remember a dude asked me if I had any “papers” and I was really confused because I was/still am a huge square.

Best concert ever was probably seeing the Flaming Lips at the tail end of their Soft Bulletin tour (again, way before they started their long trek into the Inner Asshole) at the El Rey Theater in Hollywood. At the time, the schtick of people in animal costumes and confetti cannons and fake blood and psychedelic rear projections came across as fresh and charming and heartfelt, like a shoestring-budget Pink Floyd show. They also had this thing where they were renting out these portable FM radios that were tied to the soundboard and were supposed to play the higher registered sounds that weren’t being produced over the PA and it sounded incredible. I left the theater just feeling so happy and positive. It was an experience that stuck with me, and not just because I was covered in confetti for days.

I remember seeing them at the Hollywood Bowl a year or two after on Cake’s Unlimited Sunshine Tour and feeling like it had sort of become a gimmick instead of a fun thing. And now? Well, I don’t think I’ll be seeing them any time soon.

Runner up would be seeing Elliot Smith on his Figure 8 tour. Grandaddy opened for them in support of The Sophtware Slump and they were really good. Smith was a little spacey, and, according to this report, it was mainly due to the audience being a bunch of dicks, which is typical for a Vegas crowd. It was at The Sanctuary (RIP), so it was an intimate space, so seeing him there, like 10 feet in front of you, laughing and smiling between songs or when his bass player would try and fail to land a harmony, it was really nice.

BONUS ANSWER: The worst concert I have ever attended – HANDS DOWN – was a Grateful Dead show, again at the Silver Bowl. Like I said, I’m a straight-edge-type who is terrified of drinking/drugs/dirty hippies, but at the time, I was hanging out with stoners who talked me into going, and I thought, “What the heck? Maybe I’m a Deadhead deep down inside.” The mixture of outdoor concert + Las Vegas summer + terrible music (they had like a 10-minute drum solo!) + 90s hippie kids + not being on drugs was the perfect storm of awful. The parking lot was hilarious, though. Best brownies I’ve ever had.

Note: Dylan is awesome.

Second Note: I saw Elliott Smith on the UK leg of the Figure 8 tour, and he was fucking spectacular. Quasi and… someone else…? were supporting, and it was a grand show.

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Changing Light’s reassuring compass is found in Mirah’s shimmering vocals and incisive descriptions. There is yearning (“Gold Rush” and “Fleetfoot Ghost”) and hot anger (“Goat Shepherd”), but no shortage of lyrical and musical playfulness. Whether it be the T. Rex-inspired rough edges of “Radiomind,” the rollicking lo-fi bang-and-pop of “Goat Shepherd,” or the lush pop balladry of “Turned the Heat Off,” the album corrals string sections and vintage synths with horns, a multitude of guitar tones and overdriven drums. With calm and clamor, Mirah brings us all closer together through her universal honesty and occasional use of the vocoder.

From here.

Thanks to an attempt to get a story going about the online pre-order effort for Changing Light, I’ve been lucky enough to hear the album in its entirety months ahead of release. I’ve been a Mirah fan for awhile, but this might be my favorite album of hers yet; her work as a lyricist remains startling to me, and there’re at least two songs on here that just took my breath away and made me re-listen again and again. In a perfect world, this’d be something that everyone listened to and adored, something that made Mirah embarrassingly well-loved.

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According to Abba: The Official Photo Book, published to mark 40 years since they won Eurovision with Waterloo, the band’s style was influenced in part by laws that allowed the cost of outfits to be deducted against tax – so long as the costumes were so outrageous they could not possibly be worn on the street.

The Wonderful World of Pop Music, part 23.
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“Real Love” is a trifle. It will never be included in any sane discussion of the Beatles’ best work, and if judged against the standard of just about anything recorded in the sixties it falls far short. Despite all of these caveats, however, the song still somehow manages to come alive. You can hear twenty-five years’ worth of cobwebs being shaken loose, three excellent musicians who had grown unaccustomed to working together, learning to do so once again. It’s stiff and slightly awkward, but its humble imperfections seems almost charming when placed next to the stentorian literalism of “Free As A Bird.” There was so much riding on these two tracks that there was no way the songs themselves could ever meet the world’s expectation. One of them was a misfire, and justly forgotten. The other, however … the other succeeded despite itself.

The great Tim O’Neil on the second “new” Beatles track to come out of the Anthology project from the 1990s. He’s pretty much entirely right on he value of this and “Free As A Bird.”

Related: Regina Spektor’s version, which – choral opening aside – may be my favorite version of the song.

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After two solid indie efforts, Flood was They Might Be Giants’ major-label debut, and it broke them out from the avant-garde and into real transatlantic fame. Aided by a congregation of zealots in college radio and in the MTV offices, Elektra Records pushed Flood on a newly ascendant generation of—let’s not beat around the bush—geeks. Suddenly playing concerts in suburban theatres increasingly full of spectacled teens, the bewildered band was left wondering what had become of their old art-damaged urbanite fans.

From here.

I may be misremembering, but I think that Flood was the first album I bought for myself, at age 15. I still really like it, and also still feel like the follow-up, Apollo 18, is this cruelly-ignored masterpiece.

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A sign of my mood, I worry, this song was in my head as soon as I woke up at the appropriately insomniacial time of 4:38am today. I have a love/hate relationship with Nirvana that mostly hews towards the latter, but as much as the (purposeful?) misunderstanding of how the Salem Witch Trials actually worked – “If she floats, then she is not/A witch like we’d thought”? No, it’s literally the other way around, Kurt – I have a fondness for this song, mostly down to the guitars that feel like “The End” by the Beatles played by a drunk garage band and the absolutely perfect opening couplet.

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Very very much liking this Fiona Apple track from an upcoming Starbucks compilation.

It’s a cover of a 1949 song by Austrian film composer Anton Karas, apparently. Can we get an entire album of Apple doing this, please?

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Album fans, get the tissues out: weekly US sales figures have dipped to their lowest level since Nielsen SoundScan first began logging music sales, in 1991. During the week ending Sunday 12 January, only 4.25m units (CD and vinyl) were sold across the US – exceeding the previous lowest figure of 4.49m, from the week ending 27 October 2013.

From here.

These are analog sales, not digital, BTW.