Friday, May 28, 2004
(7:29 PM) | Anonymous:
I've Done A Terrible Thing..
It's been a long time, I shouldn't have left you..without a dope beat to step to.I apologize to all. I've got no excuse - I've done nothing. Well, see...I got the network adaptor for my PS2. I'm climbing the ladder in Madden online..as well as MVP Baseball...and NBA Live..and Rugby 2004..and NHL 2004..yeah..I own them all..how terribly redundant is that? But, I should have at least done the CD posts, really. Just pathetic. So, here we are: It is TIME to do the missing 2 weeks, and then we'll do this week in a seperate post.
Before we start though, I feel I should mention my cousin Michael. Mike and I are really close, as he came from a bad situation before my aunt adopted him (from her daughter), so I guess I'm a bit of a male figure to him. He has the craziest and most diverse imagination. When we play, we don't play cops and robbers. We play international spies stalking the evil goat who kidnapped all the yodelers in the world because their noise was ruining his ears! It's ridiculous the things he comes up with. Especially when he gets biblical - then it's just hillarious. Once he gave this long diatribe about putting lamb's blood upon our lentil...I was impressed. Sometimes he asks me to play Jesus, and I get super powers, and that's great. Ridiculously smart and funny kid. He also always calls me "The Dude" or "dude", so I get to laugh at unspoken Big Lebowski references in my head the whole time too..
But, see..this once he was complaining about how the food at a restaraunt was no good. So I told him he should open his own restaraunt if he felt that way. From this, came the elaborate plans that serve as the mental blueprint for.."Michael & Dude's Cafe".
Originally it was supposed to be "Michael's Cafe", and I was to be the cook. But then, one day, when the topic came up he started screaming that I would burn his soufflets! So I was removed from the head chef position, and given part ownership. He passed this old warehouse over by his school one day, and saw a for sale sign for the house in front of it. He figured the sign was for the warehouse. He decided it was the perfect place, and began telling everyone that he'd one day have Michael & Dude's Cafe at 15th & Bryant. We will have a stage, but, in an effort to appease Nan, my aunt, he has decided that we will only play Christian music, except for his favorite song "YMCA", which..I think is pretty much Christian music anyway. There IS going to be dancing though..he took a stand on that one. Needless to say, he takes it very seriously. I have never seen a 7 year old so bent towards entrepreneurship - and this has been going at least since he was 6..maybe 5.
But, the other day he was in school, and having trouble with the math requirement. Eventually, he threw down his pencil and books in frustration. When the teacher came over, he said "I don't understand why I have to do this STUPID math! Me and Dude are going to own Michael & Dude's cafe! I DON'T NEED STUPID MATH!"
Amen to that. I love this kid. Seriously.
Also - the guy at my local Music Wherehouse, the manager who looked like the stupid guy from STAIND but was extremely knowledgable, and helpful, and reccomended many awesome bands to me, The Postal Service and The Kings of Convenience amongst them - has disappeared. He has been replaced by this big black guy with an "indie rock god" attitude. The guy seems cool enough, except that he doesn't really seem helpful, doesn't say "ahhh NICE!" when I buy cool CDs (which..I stupidly loved, dangit) and I've noticed the ratio of cool cds ordered to Guns N' Roses Best Hits and similar stuff, has gone way down. Also, every time I don't find a CD, and I go to ask if they have any in the back, he's all like "It's not out yet" and I have to be like "Oh really? I could have sworn.." so that he'll look it up and see that "oh..yeah..the new Pedro the Lion album is out. I just forgot to order any, sorry."
I also think one of the two hot women quit. =_-(
All this to say..I guess I'll have to endure the scenesters at one of the independent record stores downtown. But, I swear, if I hear 2 more people ask "do you have the 180 gram yellow-colored vinyl of this?" in that "i don't really want to know, I just want to impress you" voice..I will have to shoot someone. Only YOU can prevent Indie Scenester Death!
Finally - with Brian Wilson AND The Pixies AND Mission of Burma all back in full functioning form, has the world ever been more primed for a reunification of all mankind? Seriously..3 things that were supposed to never happen again - can the music scene set the stage for the world as a whole?
Onward HO-OOOOOOOOOO! (that should be read as if HACKSAW Jim Duggan said it, tough guy).
The Bumblebeez - White Printz EP
The Bumblebeez are great. I saw their video on MTV2 the other night - whatever that means. They also just came off a tour with N.E.R.D. which..is perhaps not as great. But..before that they toured with Radiohead. And NEXT they tour on the tightly reformed LOLLAPALOOZA:
TIME OUT
Have you all heard about the new Lollapalooza? No more old sucky bands. No more new sucky "NU-CORE" bands. It is indie all the way. Check these names: The Flaming Lips, Wilco, Michael Franti, Morrissey, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, Modest Mouse, Le Tigre, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Von Bondies, Broken Social Scene, The Walkmen, Wolf Eyes, Danger Mouse, The Bumblebeez, The String Cheese Incident, The Pixies, Basement Jaxx, Gomez, The Polyphonic Spree, TV On The Radio, The Thrills, The Fire Theft, Elbow, Wheat. And those are just the GOOD bands! INCREDIBLE. That's 25 of my top 30 bands I'd like to see in concert, ALL IN 2 DAYS (depending on the date, of course). So crazy. I will be ashamed if every member of the University Without Condition with inclinations toward this sort of music doesn't go. Disappointed for your soul.
TIME IN
The Bumblebeez are interesting. And I like it a lot. The band all plays different riffs or whatever and jam for a while, then one of the guys takes it all, cuts it all up, and distributes it throughout 3-5 minutes to create a song. This sounds a lot less structured than it is. Had I not read that, I might not have known they didn't do a normal songwriting gig. However, once I heard that, it made it all the cooler, as you caught stuff he must have just thrown in. It also results in great..um..well..it's sort of rap. I wish Rap-Rock hadn't been comandeered by Fred Durst and Suckers, as that'd be a good word for this stuff. Basically..it's almost indie rock, with all the goodness that entails, and then the guy sort of mumbles through an amplifier over top. This sounds much less appealing than it actually is. Amazingly catchy. It's almost a much more slowed down, laid back SSION, but..even in it's reserved state, it maintains the craziness that makes SSION great. I realize that Adam Robinson may be the only one that helps, as he may be the only other person with internet access to have heard the minor treat of SSION, but if we each one reach one...
Now take your candle, and go light your world, Robinson.
I once saw Twila Paris at Gaither-Fest with Orpheus Choir of Olivet Nazarene University. She had the microphone upside down for the first like..30 seconds, before she finally figured out what was wrong. She even tapped the WRONG END and looked questioningly at the sound guy trying to find out what was wrong. I cried with the pain of laughter.
Camerata Academica des Salzburger Mozarteums f. Geza Anda - Mozart: Piano Concertos 24, 25 & 5.
During the second movement of the third piece, Geza all played a wrong note! For real dawg! And I laughed at him, the great Geza "the lady pleaza" Anda and his magical piano. He probably had a deal like the boy with the magic piano in that old cartoon movie..where the piano all plays the songs for him, until the boy became ungrateful and thought himself the thackity-whackity of all things music, so the magic piano quit playing for him right when he went to CARNEGIE HALL! Anyone else see that movie?
Thursday - War All The Time
I'm not sure how long Thursday's been around, and I'm in no mood for research. But I know I've seen the patches on cool kid's backpacks for many a long year now. And I know they're the height of EMO/SCREAMO or whatever, along with Thrice and a few others. They are the lords of that genre. Which is why I expected them to be much further along. The album, were it released in a vacuum, is not bad. But, dude, The Juliana Theory was doing exactly this back 5 years ago when I was in HIGH SCHOOL! AND - they did it better. I have no problem with derivative music - heck, The Strokes would be in my top 20 bands easily. But, it needs to be one of two things:
1.) A harken back to a style or attitude or genre that seems to have been misplaced within modern music today.
2.) It takes what it derives from and casts it in an entirely new light.
This style you attempt to bring back must be one that still remains with a lot of potential for stretching and redefining either because modern means have enabled us to take different approaches not possible before, or because the style was unduly cut off because of the advent of something stupid. (IE..the slacker rock the Strokes go back to was cut off by the HAIR ROCK craze). If you start out at 1, you should definitely be moving to 2 by your third album at least, otherwise you risk becoming a mere gimick band, but hopefully others will have picked up from where you started and brought new nuances to the genre you called back. Any genre call-back is inevitably flooded with sound alikes at first, but this is okay, as hopefully at least 1 or 2 of these bands can then go on to do something interesting with the basis.
BUT - when you're re-calling EMO, a style that just got off the tongues of like..Kurt Loder and that really stupid MTV News guy Sway, you had better start at 2. And, if you are hailed as the champion of your genre, I expect a heck of a lot more, especially this far in. Okay, Juliana Theory sort of went astray with their last album - but we don't need someone to re-do what they did right, we need someone to take what they did right and progress it further. And I'm sure there's a lot of bands Juliana Theory ripped off who actually deserve the credit I'm giving them, but, again, I don't feel like researching something like Emo.
The fact remains that this is a listenable album though, if somewhat extremely forced sounding at times. But, given the preceding diatribe's reasons, I really can't give this a passing grade. Sorry Thursday. Sorry kid with Thursday concert Tee.
Fono - goesaroundcomesaround
I remember once hailing Fono as the saviors of Christian Rock, and I think they should have been, except they were released on small time, mostly repackaging old Altar Boys and Choir albums, KMG Records. So, instead they sort of wallowed around. The thing is, if I'm remembering right, they were somewhat big in England before coming over here, at least on the radio type big, which may have put them no more in the Brittist public consciousness than the Marvelous 3 were in ours, but still The Marvelous 3 made a lot more money than 99% of Christian bands.
So, I guess I find it strange that this band which was even picked up for secular distribution at one time, is now pretty much playing local shows around San Diego. I figured they'd broken up, as 90% of Christian bands do, after one album because THE STUPID LABELS SIGNED THEM TOO QUICKLY AND TOO SHORTLY INTO THEIR CAREER! (sorry, but this is a major flaw that is at the root of the predominately sucky Christian music scene, and it irks me. "Hey..this band didn't suck when I saw them open for Petra! They've been together a few months and played 20 shows..we should sign them and give them a big budget and national tour!")
The difference is that Fono is actually mostly good. And certainly good considering their surrounding on your typical Family Bookstore shelf. But, for every bit where they really sound awesome, they then start sounding a bit goo-goo dollish. But, on their website they reccomend the new Muse album, so I'd have to think that they've probably grown considerably in the 3-5 years since this release. All that said, there's at least 5 very good songs on this cd that are as good or better than any Christian songs released (minus Big Big House, of course), and would stand up well to secular competition. That this album wasn't a staple in youth groups around the country is sad indeed.
Gigantor - Back To The Rockets
Well. I guess Gigantor's from Germany, which I didn't know until just now when I found their website to provide you all linkage. Somehow that makes this album suck less in my mind, strange. I mean..the only other music I can associate with Germany is David Hasselhoff and, you know, the scary guy singing "Du Hast Mich". So, I guess now Gigantor somewhat gets a pass. It's like when my dad told me the biblical age of innocence was at whatever age you figured out what was right and wrong, so some people could never reach that point even. Prior to this I'd heard from someone, probably some other punk church kid, that it was 12, and I was fast approaching that, so I was getting scared thinking of all the responsibility.
So, you can't really blame Gigantor for being vanilla Pop/Punk. They might not have grown up with Green Day constantly played all around them, or Blink 182 running around all naked. They might not even know of all the bands who have come before them. Oblivious to it all, they've released pretty much the same thing - like how those cannibal tribes in Africa still named 8 of the 10 commandments as evil, without ever hearing them! I don't know if that truly happened, but I heard it as fact a lot when I was young. Anyway, there's nothing new here, and I can't reccomend it for listening, as it's no different than whatever local pop-punk band's cds you can go buy out of their trunk for 4-5 bucks. It'd be better if they'd just spoken with those really loud, constantly loud German voices that all German people speak in, rather than the American sounding stuff here. But, heck, they're named after that huge japanese robot cartoon that used to come on Saturdays after M.A.S.K.
MASK crusaders - working overtime, fighting crime! God, I loved that show.
The Paper Chase - Hide The Kitchen Knives
I really thought this CD was going to suck, I must admit. That was mostly because the band capitalizes their name like this: the pAper chAse. So many XXXSuCk BaNDXXX's came to mind. Yet, somehow, they overcame that to the point where this CD has entered regular home rotation. I think this may just qualify as scream-o..except that it's done correctly. The musicianship is so amazingly tight by all players, that it's just driving, pulsing, awesome music. It's also really really dark. That seems a strange way to describe music, but it really comes off like a murder mystery rock opera or something cooler than that sounds. The instrumentation is great, drawing in a lot of really dark piano that just scarily plays beneath the surface, and the bass lines serve as a perfect way to drive everything home. The lyrics walk the fine line between pretentious pondering and actually just fitting in perfect with the music, tending toward the latter though. The singer doesn't seem to force the screaming, just fitting it in where it almost needs to be done and would actually seem out of place if it wasn't done. I think I'm gonna risk all the emo scenesters in 2 weeks to go see these guys live, as it's also the week of their new CD release. There's no reason why I should like this band, between the name and the general surroundings of the music style, yet, somehow everything that's wrong with all the bands I complain about is done right here. Excellent stuff.
It just struck me that people who aren't into music probably never read, or are extremely bored by these posts. Especially given the somewhat "under the surface" nature of most of these bands. Am I alienating a large portion of The Weblog's audience? I apologize if so. Hopefully you all at least got a kick out of the Michael story earlier.
Also, it's all late, so I think I'll have to do last week and this week tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow. Not like..in a week, as was the case this time.
Good cheer to all.
