Here is the church and here is the steeple
We sure are cute for two ugly people
I don’t see what anyone can see in anyone else…but you
- The Moldy Peaches

About two weeks ago, Erin and I went out to see Juno. It was the second movie that I’ve seen in a year, the other being Superbad. Either I have man-crush on Michael Cera or I really miss Arrested Development. I’m going to be generous and say it’s a little from column A and a little from column B. One of the things drawing me to this movie, other than the great reviews, was that I heard a lot of people say that they went out and bought the soundtrack after the movie.

I think it would be interesting to be in the soundtrack business. While I don’t sit around and say, “Hey, this song would go great in an action movie” or “if Erin heard this during a particularly sad part of a movie, she’d be bawling her eyes out.” I do occasionally think some songs would be good candidates for a movie or tv show soundtrack.

Well if you’re so smart, why don’t you give us some examples? Fine, I’ll do that.

• The Mountain Goats – This Year. This song would be a good start to a movie about that kid from a troubled home who defies the odds and graduates high school. Start the movie with him driving to an outdoor party with his other troubled friends.
• TV on the Radio – Staring at the Sun. Alone in a box of a room with a dirt floor, the underground fighter focuses hard on his upcoming bout. Video montage of his training plays to the music of TV on the Radio.
• Andy McKee - Drifting. A young musical prodigy and the stodgy old man helping him realize his talents practice together to overcome the recess beatings. Unfortunately for the young boy, he plays the clarinet.
• Girl Talk – Bounce That. Another montage. In this one, a rich, preppy high school cheer leading squad takes on the inner-city squad with soul. Off in the distance, a guy in a wacky hat is slowly being served by another guy in a wife-beater. In the end, they all become friends. Who would have seen that coming? Not me.

Oh, I guess I should probably mention that I thought that the soundtrack for Juno was pretty average, mostly because I couldn’t picture myself enjoying the songs outside of the context of the movie. That being said, I enjoyed the movie and would recommend it.

Today’s song comes from Luke Temple. It’s a quiet song that I think would fit well in a movie soundtrack. Check out People Do.

Hey everybody. I’ll be out on Monday attending the funeral of my grandma, a wonderful Irish women of 90 years who suffered for too long with Alzheimer’s. If you’re itching for a song, check out Skinny Love by Bon Iver, whose CD comes out on February 19th. Thanks to Kevin for “getting me in on the ground floor” with this guy – I expect great things from this CD.

I’ll be back on Wednesday.

Link to song

I say, my, my slow decent
Into alcoholism it went
To my head, where I really need it
With the views that remain untreated
- The New Pornographers

The year was 2001. I had downloaded something from Virgin music store that streamed music to my computer. One of the songs that came on was especially catchy – a tune called The Slow Decent into Alcoholism and it was by some strange group called The New Pornographers. I remember thinking, “That’s an interesting name for a band that sings unoffensive pop rock.” I figured that was that, and slowly forgot about them.

Then my roommate Sam (shout out to Seattle Sam) decided that it was his mission to proclaim the best band ever, and while that’s overstating things a bit, it’s pretty darn close.

Anyway, that’s not what today’s post is about. Today’s post is about me getting excited about what 2008 music has to offer. I’m itching for new releases, and checking out my favorite bands that put out records in 2006. Here’s a quick rundown of what I found:

• The Decemberists – These guys were responsible for my favorite album of 2006, The Crane Wife. No real messages about a new album, although on April 8th, a CD entitled Colin Meloy Sings Live! That’s not an exclamation point from me – that’s what it’s called. More info on their web page.
• The Hold Steady – They are in the recording studio, finishing up on their yet-to-be-titled next release that currently has no due date, although I would expect it sometime this summer. Woo hoo!
• Margot & The Nuclear So & So’s – Also in the studio. Quick funny story – I intended on putting this stuff on my web page since early this week, and then I got the new issue of Spin in the mail today. In it, there’s an article on the 42 most anticipated albums of the year as well as “Who’s Next”. First in line of those bands happens to be Margot. Congrats, Spin. You’ve caught up to me.
• Other bands with CD’s I plan on getting: Death Cab for Cutie (May), Wolf Parade (June), Tapes & Tapes (spring), The Raconteurs, (May), and I’m intrigued by a new My Bloody Valentine possibly coming out this spring, considering they haven’t put out an album since 1991.

One final thing I want to mention. On Sunday, Neko Case with be gracing the Adult Swim juggernaut, Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Personally, I stopped watching this show once I left college. Two reasons precipitated this. The first is simple – it’s on late and Nick + no sleep = not good. The second is that it became the most popular non-Futurama show on Adult Swim, and created episodes that made you realize that they knew they were invincible – loose plot and weird things happening for no good reason. The fourth season was a like an old band trying to put out a new album that’s entire crap (see Rolling Stones, The circa 1967-present)

In celebration of Neko making her cartoon character debut, I’m going to play the opening track from the New Pornographers debut album, Mass Romantic. I listened to this song about 6 times in a row in the last half hour of work today.

Hmm… that’s kind of a risque album cover down there. No wonder their name is The New Pornographers.

I’ve got souvenirs but yesterday can’t mean too much,
Have we missed an opportunity?
- Architecture in Helsinki

It seems like it was fairly recent, but it was two years ago that I went and saw Arcade Fire at First Ave. Wolf Parade was one of the opening bands and their synthesizer player decided to celebrate their final tour date in the states by imbibing a little too much and not being able to properly switch to play bass, but I’ve told this story before.

The other part of the story was that throughout the entire show, the members of Arcade Fire were telling us that we should go see the band that was playing at the 7th Street Entry (same building as First Ave.) called Architecture in Helsinki. At the time, I didn’t know who they were, just that my brother liked them.

Their sophomore album, In Case We Die was great. Unfortunately, their most recent album, Places Like This wasn’t too hot, except for Debbie, who’s chorus goes, “Hey there, hey there. Debbie down down Debbie down Debbie Debbie Debbie Debbie down down Debbie down Debbie Debbie Debbie Debbie down down down down.” You can check out the song for yourself on one of my previous posts.

Sidebar – I’m amused that I enjoy two weird songs involving somebody named Debra (Debbie). The other being the final song on Beck’s Midnite Vultures, which contains such great lyrics as, “I met you at JC Penny” and “I said lady, step inside my Hyundai.” I’ll be honest. When it looked like I might be buying a Hyundai, I was excited to possibly have the opportunity overuse that exact phrase. Erin would have loved it.

Anyway, I picked up Architecture in Helsinki’s first album, Fingers Crossed, and caught a familiar sounding tune. It’s the background music from those new Sprint (I think) commercials where it looks like people are holding up glowing tubes and it’s cool time-lapse photography, but it’s really just computers. Check out Souvenirs.

Hey guys and gals. No lyrics today since I’m putting this post together before work. I found this cool (and free!) CD on emusic this weekend from a website called daytrotter.com. I went to check out the website and found this really cool collection of live cuts from artists that I like. Here’s a quick rundown of what I got on their sampler CD:

• Maritime – Guns of Navarone
• Mountain Goats – Pinklon (previously unreleased)
• White Rabbits – Kid on My Shoulders
• Tokyo Police Club – Be Good
• Okkervil River – April Anne
• Andrew Bird – Lull

Add to that the fact that they had an interview with The Brunettes on the front page when I checked it out and I’m hooked. Well, technically I’m impressed. I haven’t visited enough yet to say that I’m hooked.

Did I mention that each of the studio session songs are available to stream online or download? They use 128Kb MP3’s, so it may not be worth it to start taking everything off the website, but there’s going to be some great tracks up there as well. Check out the archives to see just how impressive of a collection that they have.

Anyway, today’s song comes from this particular album. It’s Andrew Bird’s Lull, a very mellow song for a cold Monday morning.

Hip hop a lulu,
She, she’s my baby,
Heard it all before,
And it’s driving me crazy.
-Junior Senior

It’s been an interesting couple of days. First, I’ve been taking a class while at work the past two days (I know, school at work? Crazy!). Anyway, in the middle of class today, I realized that I miss being able to listen to music while I’m at work. It seems like if I listen to music, it needs to rock extra hard to impress me. None of this mediocre, singer-songwriter stuff that passes as filler. Eh, who am I kidding, right? I’ll take whatever is given to me.

Quick sidebar – it snowed here all day, leaving enough snow on my driveway for me to warrant not feeling silly to use the snow blower. Let me tell ya – a scarf and glasses don’t mix, as was proven when I carved a six-foot path into my lawn, thinking that’s where the sidewalk was on the corner. I’ve titled that mistake, “Don’t snow blow while drinking,” even though it was the fogged up glasses causing the aforementioned trail.

Yeah, I know. That wasn’t a quick sidebar. Getting back to the super-charged song, I think I have an easy choice. It’s Nights of Cydonia by everybody’s favorite English house of rock, Muse. Two stories about this particular song.

1. When seeing Muse at lollapalooza last summer (best show of my life), Muse ended with this song. Picture me standing around a bunch of people I don’t know (I had gotten separated from Chris) singing the high part of this song at the top of my lungs and having nobody be bothered by it because nobody could hear anybody else.
2. Chris came home for Christmas and brought along his Wii with Guitar Hero. Nights of Cydonia is one of the songs on the game. I attempted to play it, and made it up to about the 3:15 mark when they decided that the synthesizer part should be played by guitar. I failed miserably and Erin laughed at me, later blaming it on the impossibility of the game rather than my ineptitude.

For these two reasons, this is a super-charged Friday song.

h

Somewhere out there if love can see us through
Then we’ll be together somewhere out there
Out where dreams come true
- An American Tail

Oh, American Idol? Not American Tail? You mean I can’t wax poetic about Fievel Mousekewitz and his immigrant father, only known as Papa? Fine.

So why didn’t anyone tell me that American Idol premiered last night? Oh right, I wouldn’t have cared. However, in this instance, noeviltwin will take the moral high ground, and instead let the loyal readers pipe up in the comments section.

The only thing I will say, is that I think that American Idol should be renamed to American Ballad Singer because that’s how it usually ends up, and unfortunately the niche of ballad singing is somewhat small. Then again, so is the niche of gypsy punk, and I still enjoy Gogol Bordello. Also, I have been known to be way too loud in singing the chorus of Kelly Clarkson’s Since You’ve Been Gone. Erin can attest to that.

I thought that today I would give you an artist who would steam-roll the show and easily become the next American Idol. That artist is Sharon Jones backed by The Dap Kings. Interesting fact about The Dap Kings (from wikipedia)

The Dap-kings were then hired as session musicians on a number of projects associated with New York based DJ/producer/recording artist Mark Ronson. Most notable of these is their extensive inclusion and somewhat unheralded contribution to Amy Winehouse’s album Back To Black (2006). Six of the album’s eleven tracks feature various members of the Dap-Kings with two notable hits from the album, Rehab and You Know I’m No Good, extensively featuring the Dap-Kings.

So, does the backing band make the artist? In both of these cases, not at all. Check out Something’s Changed.

The past is a grotesque animal,
And in its eyes you see
How completely wrong,
You can be
- Of Montreal

I’ve decided to sell my old mini disc player. This isn’t really a big deal. I haven’t touched the thing for two years, and that was only to move it into my new house. But, since the weather got warm last weekend, Erin and I decided to do a little feels-like-spring cleaning. We now have an ebay pile.

I took the time today to go through each of the 77 mini discs that I owned to erase them and white out their labels. Lets just say it was an interesting look back at some of the music I was listening to in the late 90’s and early 00’s. I’ve always been the person who is looking for discovering music that people haven’t heard of before, and apparently at this point in my life, that lead me down the punk/hard rock route.

I thought punk was fun, and enjoyed a type of music where chord structures were so simple that you really had to kick it up a notch with lyrics – at least that’s what I think I was thinking. The hard stuff? Well, I was an adolescent, and this was the time when acts like Korn (ugh) and Limp Bizkit (double ugh) were getting solid airplay.

So how did I get from there to here? Honestly, I think a lot of it had to do with bands that friends passed on to me – Sunny Day Real Estate, The Get Up Kids, and Jimmy Eat World combined with this new-fangled thing called high-speed internet, allowed me to branch out and explore.

Eventually, collecting music became a hobby of mine and I wanted to share. That’s why I’m here, writing for a rarely-visited blog that gets most of its traffic from facebook. Actually, I’m not sure where most of my traffic comes from – the daily statistic collector has been broken since mid-December. I should really get that looked at.

Reading back on this post, this sounds like the type of post that I would use for my one-year anniversary of this blog (February 6th for those of you keeping track). Oh well, maybe I’ll just copy and paste it then. Or maybe I’ll be ironic and take the day off. Then you can explain to me that I don’t understand irony (true).

Today’s song comes from my first new album of the new year. It is by a band/guy called Wisely, which is short for Willy Wisely, the Minneapolis native, who has been making music since 1989. Based on the bands that I listen to, that is an old-timer. First impressions? The album starts out strong, has a couple of weak songs in the 3-5 range, but picks it up again towards the end. Check out the opening track, On My Way. I think his voice sounds a lot like the lead singer of Barenaked Ladies in this song.

No lyrics today – we’re streamlining this puppy! And by puppy, I mean this post. I think lyrics should be back on Monday.

Today is another exciting edition of the iPod random game, which usually comes up when I run out of time to write a post. I set the ol’ iPod to shuffle all of my songs and will try and describe the first five that showed up.

• The New Amsterdams – Hughes. This song is off their 2007 release, At the Foot of My Rival which was #40 on my best of list from last year. This song contains three things that I consider classic New Amsterdams – first the buzz of the amplifier, the sound of Matt Prior singing through a filter, and an old pump-style piano, also known as a harmonium (I think).

• Reggie and the Full Effect – Fought and Won Over. Look at that, two songs by offshoots of The Get Up Kids. Reggie is actually Get Up Kids keyboardist James DeWees playing all of the instruments. This song combines throaty guitars with constant harmonies and is actually one of the slower songs Reggie has made.

• Maritime – First Night on Earth. This is the 11th track on Maritime’s new album, Heresy and the Hotel Choir. The opening tracks of this CD are so good that I usually skip to the start of the CD by the time I get here. Using a scratchy sound that sounds like you’ve blown out a speaker to keep beat, this slow song is a little slow for my taste.

• The Avalanches – Since I Left You. I could write an entire post about The Avalanches. This is the title track to their 2000 album, Since I Left You, and also serves as the opening track of the CD. They have been working on their sophomore release since 2000, and rumor has it that they might actually be close. You could classify this as a “highly anticipated album”.

• Moonbabies – Take Me to the Ballroom. We finish with the best song off of an under-appreciated album. Is it under-appreciated because the band is called Moonbabies? Probably. I think that’s all I’ll say about it.

So, from these songs I decided to play Since I Left You by The Avalanches. It ends sort of abruptly, but that’s because the entire album plays like a single song. Did I tell you that the entire album uses approximately 3500 vinyl samples on it? That’s probably why it’s been seven years since their previous release.

I want a new drug,
One that does what it should.
-Huey Lewis and the News

I want a new duck,
One that won’t spill my beer.
-Weird Al Yankovic

Today was one of those, “I need to find more music” days. There are a lot of albums out there that I’d like to check out, but apparently I’ve gotten pretty picky (says the guy who had enough albums to make a top-40 list last year). Emusic lets you listen to 30-second samples of songs from albums, so I run into the problem that some tracks sound like I should get the album, and other tracks sound like I should stay away.

A little background here. I’m an album guy. The entirety of an album can affect my opinion on the good tracks from that album. I think it goes back to my days of actual radio listening where I would love that hot track and go and buy the CD, only to find out that it was the only good song on the album. Apparently I hold grudges.

On top of that, I generally listen to albums at work, and I’m less likely to listen to a short set of songs versus an album so that I don’t have to look down at the iPod and stop working as often. Then again, there are times where I’m looking for an excuse to stop working, so that might not be the actual reason.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I like the podcast from The Current called music heads. In this podcast, three people each bring in an album to talk about and whether or not it is “working for them.” One of the regular guests, Mark Wheat, likes to talk about the proper length of an album. My impression of him is that he doesn’t think that filler tracks are needed and that a quality EP is better than an average LP. Obviously, there’s issues here since people can’t charge as much for an EP, and if you’re paying by the track, then that extra track can make an extra $1 for you.

So where does that leave me? Well, less full albums I guess, and more singles. More than likely, I’ll probably make a playlist of these singles and shuffle them so that I don’t forget about them. That’ll make it fun!

Today’s song is my first venture into this new way of listening to music. Yelling About Music’s #1 album of 2007 was Apparat’s Walls. I’d like to try and get into this album, but I already know that it’s probably a waste for me to download the entire thing, because well… I can only listen to so much electronic experimental in a single sitting. Check out Arcadia.