Saturday, May 07, 2005
(3:52 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Fine, I'll write about music
Robb is apparently dead. He made his t-shirts, got his 15 minutes of fame, and quietly retired to his online poker table. I shall have to write about music now.- Godspeed You Black Emperor, Yanqui UXO
I love Godspeed. By most objective measures, they are currently my favorite band. There is no other band, for instance, whose complete works I so often listen to all at once, in chronological order. Their last album, however, is a disappointment. After Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven, there were two options open to them: push the "found sound" thing even further, or just go ambient. The fact that this was a choice they faced is only apparent because they chose the worse option. Past albums certainly had "background music" sections, and that is part of what makes it possible to listen to their music all at once. But they also had a lot of really cool, vaguely creepy sound clips that punctuated the albums and gave them a kind of large-scale structure -- it gave me, at least, the impression that they were trying to say something very specific and that I was this close to figuring it out (i.e., it encouraged paranoia). And in a weird way, they also gave a kind of structure to the time during which they were playing, which is why I so loved to play Lift Your Skinny Fists on my commute from CTS to Bourbonnais. Yanqui UXO is not like that at all -- it's completely forgettable, even while it's playing. - Wilco, Summer Teeth
Robb (God rest his soul!) sent me this a while back -- I fell in love with it last summer, but somehow my household lost its copy. Getting back to it, I realize how much my nostalgia depended on just a handful of good songs -- primarily "How to Fight the Loneliness" and "She's a Jar." There are a couple of second-tier songs that are worth coming back to, such as "Shot in the Arm," but to all you people who think it's their best work and they betrayed you by making Yankee Hotel Foxtrot -- you're insane. And wrong. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is better, objectively, just like OK Computer is better than The Bends and Slanted & Enchanted is better than Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. (The "liberal" position that both are equally good is a priori false.) - Muse, Origin of Symmetry
I know that Muse is getting a lot of radio airplay in certain settings, but aside from "Time is Running Out" and perhaps a couple other songs, Absolution is a terrible let-down. That's why you need to get Origin of Symmetry, which last time I checked was not released in the US. (E-mail me if you'd like to arrange to receive this album via instant messaging software.)
