We are the Pipettes
And we’ve got no regrets
If you haven’t noticed yet
We’re the prettiest girls you’ve ever met
-The Pipettes

I picked up The Pipettes CD this week as a part of my “I need to listen to as much music as possible so I don’t end up missing out on something that I should have” panic mode.

Erin says that they sound like the Spice Girls, but when she brought it up, our conversation went something like this:

Nick: Yo, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want

Erin: So, tell me what you want, what you really really want

Nick: I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, really really really would appreciate it if you didn’t say that The Pipettes sound like the Spice Girls if you could.

Erin: Ok, I guess.

Nick: Zigga Zig ah!

While I’m talking about the Spice Girls, one thing that always annoyed me about them was their liberal use of letter pronunciation. Sometimes they pronounced z like ‘zee’ like when they wanted to rhyme it with “You wanna get with me, you bettah listen carefully” and then came right back and pronounced it ‘zed’ when it needed to rhyme with head. I was apparently a very anal 8th grader.

Anyway, check out today’s song from the Pipettes, Pull Shapes. It follows this year’s trend by using a poppy disco beat.

Lizards in the pressure zone,
Mother knows it’s only a phase.
-Beck

Saturday will be December 1st.

Wow, Nick. I didn’t realize you learned how to read a calendar. Have a cookie.

Nick like cookies… and it’s never good to post on an empty stomach.

The start of December always seems to bring out the best and worst of enjoying music. You see, even before I had this web page set up to tell people what music to listen to, I tended to tell people what music to listen to by creating the end of year top-”pick a number” list. Last year it was a top-10 list because I found 2006 to be a somewhat weak year musically.

Maybe it was because I was adjusting to being married that I wasn’t able to find the hidden gems that I’ve found this year. Maybe this web site forced it out of me, but right now, I’m counting 30 albums for consideration. Assuming that the average length of these albums is a half hour (it’s more than that, I’m sure) that’s 15 hours of listening that I need to do to pick my end of year list. Add to that the late comers – albums that I’ve wanted to pick up this year, but haven’t, and I’ve got a little bit of a mess to deal with.

Oh, boo hoo. The writer of an MP3 blog is complaining about having to listen to music. I feel so bad for him.

Thanks for your sympathy.

Anyway, to completely ignore music that came out this year, today’s song comes from last year. It’s by Camera Obscura and is called Lloyd, I’m Ready to be Heartbroken.

The French didn’t want me around,
They didn’t like my groove.
-Josh Rouse

Hey, has anybody paid close attention to the Ian Ball track I posted last week, cause apparently the lyrics are a little more risque than I originally realized. Seems to be his calling card, to surprise you with the contents of his innocent-sounding music. Oh, that Ian Ball, right?

Last week, I also mentioned that I had picked up the new Saves the Day, Under the Boards. Saves the Day is one of those bands that I’ve followed for a long time. Since Stay What You Are in 2001, to be exact. They’re also one of those bands that really surprise me with the number of albums that they’ve output recently. Sound the Alarm came out early last year and now this album.

Yes, I understand that coming out with two albums in a little over a year isn’t exactly a Josh Rouse-ian effort, but considering that they were averaging two to three years between albums, to suddenly throw out two albums in a little over a year is unexpected.

Saves the Day is also one of those bands that surprise me with how many albums of theirs that I own. I even have Ups & Downs: Early Recordings and B-Sides. That’s commitment, people.

While I’m ranting, I’ll also throw out that my favorite album of theirs is In Reverie, a critically acclaimed flop, and their pop-iest record to date. Simliar to Weezer’s Pinkerton in it’s alienation of hard-core Saves the Day fans, this album didn’t sit well and fans let lead singer Chris Conley know that this was the case, which is how we now have these two most recent albums trying to return to the days of Stay What You Are instead of evolving into something better.

Today’s song comes from the new Saves the Day album. Here’s Radio

Have a good Thanksgiving? I know I did. Hopefully everybody is sitting around today giving thanks for not having to go to work. Today will be a short post since I don’t have anything prepared.

Today’s song comes from a group called The Blow. I picked up this album on a whim and it turns out that I really don’t like it. Somehow, it ends up on my playlist when I shuffle songs a lot, so I try and go back to see why I picked it up in the first place. The reason? The second song on the album, Parenthesis. Good song. You should check it out sometime. Like now.

Noeviltwin bonus! Here’s the music video for Parenthesis. You’re welcome.

At least in dying you don’t have to deal with new wave for a second time
-The Hold Steady

I’m having a hard time matching up lyrics with posts, but that’s ok because this is definitely a mash-up sort of post. Questionable Content (my favorite web comic) posted a link to some great youtube clips of great guitarists shredding, with a special twist. I doubt Erin would find these videos funny, but I find them hilarious.

This was the week to clean out my emusic account before the tracks refreshed. Here’s the CDs that I picked up and my first impressions:

Ian Ball – Who Goes There. Gomez lead singer, Ian Ball puts out his first solo album. Sound familiar? That’s because I talked about it yesterday. This album starts strong, but starts to sound the same near the end. Still, not a bad listen.

Orgone – The Killion Floor. This is 18 tracks and 81 minutes of old-school jazz funk. A combination of original songs and remakes, this album has a very analog sound to it – like listening to an LP coming out of my iPod. Old meets new, I guess.

Saves the Day – Under the Boards. I need to write a post about bands like Saves the Day – bands that I own a ton of albums from but never remember this fact until I pick them on the ol’ iPod. On first listen of this, I decided to listen to In Reverie instead. On second listen, I realized that I might like this more than Sound the Alarm.

So there you have it, people. Three new albums, two of which you’ll be hearing from this week.

But Nick, we’ve only heard Ian Ball this week. I don’t get it.

I can’t deal with this right now. Just check out today’s song Who Knows Who? from Orgone, and I’ll let you figure out the answer for yourself.

Here I go again on my own
Going down the only road I’ve ever known
Like a drifter I was born to walk alone
-Whitesnake

Come on, how often am I going to be able to use Whitesnake lyrics to open a post with?

I picked up an album from emusic last week by Ian Ball, lead singer of the band Gomez. I have heard good things about Gomez’s latest album, How We Operate, but I haven’t gotten around to picking it up. Instead, I picked up Ian Ball’s new album, Who Goes There.

Sidebar – in looking up both of these albums on allmusic.com, I noticed that the group picture on the discography page for both Ian Ball and Gomez is the same. That’s some lazy workmanship, allmusic.com…

It seems like there have been a lot of solo albums recently that can’t be easily distinguished from the soloist’s band’s album. Off the top of my head, there’s been Thom Yorke’s (Radiohead) The Eraser, Kevin Drew’s (Broken Social Scene) Spirit If…, and maybe even Jenny Lewis’s (Rilo Kiley) Rabbit Fur Coat. Jenny Lewis might not fit the bill since she wasn’t normally the lead singer in most of the songs from Rilo Kiley’s previous albums, but I digress.

I find this topic interesting because it poses the question as to why people go solo. Usually the easy answer is to be able to control all aspects of the recording process without having to get ok’s from the backing band. If that’s the case, then you’d assume that their music would sound a little different from what they’re normally playing. Kevin Drew’s solo album confuses me more than the others because his backing band is members of Broken Social Scene.

Sidebar – in doing a little digging on this, I found out that Broken Social Scene is planning on doing a series of Broken Social Scene Presents… albums in the future, so I guess they’re playing around with handing the reigns of the band over to different people each time around. That’s pretty cool.

Oh well, today’s point is going to be that if Gomez sounds anything like Ian Ball (and I hear that they do) I might have to go out and find me some Gomez. Today’s song is called Failure and is by Ian Ball.

T.H.E.H.I.V.E.S.
-The Hives

It’s interesting how quickly music is making it into today’s TV shows. Radiohead announces their new album, In Rainbows on October 1st. It is released as a digital download on October 10th, and the song All I Need is used in the TV show Life on November 14th. Yes, technically a month is a long time, but I still found it amusing.

Anyway, on to The Hives. Their new album, The Black and White Album, hit store shelves on Tuesday. I took my $5 reward zone reward down to Best Buy and picked up the CD for a little over $3. Neato.

Let me tell you a little something about The Hives. Their shtick is to be arrogant and rock hard. They’re like the high school punk band that grew up, matured a little, but still wanted to jump around on the stage and look cool. I think the fact that this CD was originally titled The World’s First Perfect Album should help you understand what I’m getting at.

That being said, they’re very good at what they do. It’s when they try and do something that they don’t normally do is when it doesn’t work at all. The first three tracks on this CD were taken exactly from John Cusack’s playbook in High Fidelity:

The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.

It’s a CD of highest highs and mediocre lows. In the end, it plays well with your hand on the next track button to keep things the way they should be – with The Hives playing fast and loud.

I’m playing Try It Again by The Hives today. Make sure you listen all the way to the end so you can laugh at the final cheering girl. Yeah!

We promised the world we’d tame it.
What were we hoping for?
-Bloc Party

Today’s post was supposed to be about all of the solo albums that have been coming out this year and how they sound a lot like the bands that they are a part of. But then I remembered about a CD whose existence I had forgotten about since I can’t get it here in Rochester. It’s by a band called Tunng. Today, I went to their myspace page for a quick fix and ended up stumbling on the final song in the list, Pioneers.

Why is this interesting enough to turn away other blog topics like I’ve turned away my cat after we got the dog? Mostly, it’s just my excitement at recognizing the song. It’s a remake of a Bloc Party song with the same name (as is the case with most remakes). It’s also because the lead singer of Tunng sounds a lot like Kele Okereke, lead singer of Bloc Party.

With all of the bad remakes I’ve heard this past year (Stars’ Do You Trust Your Friends?, Exit Music (Radiohead Tribute), and Architecture in Helsinki’s We Died, They Remixed) it’s kind of refreshing to hear a good, new remix. I love this song and will probably listen to it five to ten times at work tomorrow. Then I’ll get sick of it and probably forget about it until Christmas when I hope to actually get Tunng’s new album, Good Arrows. Hear that, Erin? Smiley!

If you haven’t caught my drift, today’s song is the remake of Bloc Party’s Pioneers with reinterpretation by Tunng. You may find parts of it weird, but I find it awesome. Maybe if you know the original, it will be just as cool for you.

On the radio
We heard November Rain
That solo’s really long
But it’s a pretty song
We listened to it twice
‘Cause the DJ was asleep
-Regina Spektor

We’re going to run things backwards today. The lyrics above are from today’s song, On The Radio by Regina Spektor. It’s a fun song, but as you can tell from above, the lyrics don’t rhyme, at least not in your typical rhyming pattern, and that bugs me a little. Does it bug me enough to take away from the song? Probably not.

I remember when Sheryl Crowe’s song, All I Wanna Do was popular. It was probably the first song that I remember being bothered by not having rhyming lyrics, and I disliked the song for that reason. Now? Well, I actually like the song. Also, all I really want to do is to have some fun, and well… I’ve got this feeling that I’m not the only one. On top of that, I’m a fan of peeling the label off of any beers that I might be drinking.

Sidebar 1 – November Rain is another one of those songs that I learned how to play on the piano. If I could find that sheet music and actually owned a piano, I’d probably try and play it right now. The guitar solo didn’t translate to piano, however.

Siderbar 2 – November Rain is a song by Guns N’ Roses. Sheryl Crow did a remake on Sweet Child O’ Mine – also a song by GNR. I just thought you’d like to know that.

Getting back on track… One of my favorite parts about the indie music scene is that it’s not bogged down with the cliche lyrics you usually hear in a typical top-40 love song on the radio. Hearing the lyrical dexterity of Death Cab for Cutie is hard to beat:

In Catholic School
as vicious as Roman Rule
I got my knuckles bruised
by a lady in black.
And I held my tongue
as she told me, “Son,
fear is the heard of love.”
So I never went back

In comparison, The Shins lyrics rarely rhyme, but they can come up with something like this:

After that confrontation
You left me wringing my cold hands
We shared some information
We might not recover from
And I watch your convictions
Melt like ice cubes in an ocean
You were so poorly cast as a malcontent

I think that it’s up to the band to entertain you enough to get past the fact that their lyrics may or may not rhyme. You can decide whether or not Regina Spektor does a good job of that with today’s song, On the Radio.

Don’t wanna die in a car crash.
-She’s Spanish, I’m American

They speak the truth, don’t they, folks? I’ve been looking to get my hands on the self-titled album from She’s Spanish, I’m American for a while, but I kept looking for it under Josh Rouse since the group is a collaboration between he and Paz Suay.

I managed to stumble on the actual name through an interview on The Current. I’ve been having a lot of fun lately, listening to the in-studio interviews/performances that are archived on their website here. Check them out if you have any time.

The Current actually takes these performances and selects their favorites to be put onto their Live Current CD’s. I got the initial one two or three years ago when they had just started broadcasting, which I learned is no longer offered when you become a member. I’m also picking up volume three sometime here.

Anyway, today’s song comes from She’s Spanish, I’m American, and it’s called Car Crash.