I twittered a couple of things (really, only two, but I'm not going to adjust this paragraph retroactively) over the course of listening to this album, as I normally do, but I figure I'll consolidate them here and elaborate upon them, because this is an interesting album and it's getting a lot of attention, so I'll jump on the bandwagon and give it my attention.

Grizzly Bear's new album will make great quiet background music in the bedrooms of hipsters. Mine, too, but this ain't driving music.

My initial listen to Veckatimest left me feeling sleepy. So sleepy, in fact, that I passed out shortly after writing this tweet. It left me with a certain image in my head inspired by my youth. About six years ago I went with my friend to visit this goth girl, and in her bedroom, VAST's self-titled debut was playing quietly on the stereo and it was such perfect mood music. I played perfectly at low volumes and really set the mood of her bedroom.

This album feels like it could set the mood of any number of indie chick's bedroom. It's got this dreamy feeling to it, like sun filtering through the trees on a Sunday morning, or just filtering through the blinds, you know, and there's some girl in plaid lying there in bed with no pants on, all smooth pale leg flesh stretching on for miles. That's how this album feels for the first five tracks.

When I approach Veckatimest from the assumption it's an 80's goth album by way of Wilco and The Shins, then it makes way more sense.

This is an odd album overall, the style and sound of it is pretty unique as far as my experience with music goes. This Twitter sums up how I work it into my musical spectrum: vocals from Christian Death mixed with a Wilco and Shins mix of music.

Pitchfork's review of Eminem's latest album makes a couple of interest statements about musical fidelity and Dr. Dre's new expensive headphones:

But ever since "In Da Club" (and probably because of it), Dre has treated production like a test run for his very expensive headphones, concerning himself with only the most inert, stainless steel sounds. But you don't have to be an audiophile to find fault with the music here

And I bring this up to say the nicest thing I can about this album: it sounds incredible. This is not an album of electronic beats and synthesized bloops, this is about the rich sound of instruments layered on top of one another and used to make marvelous music. You remember when Radiohead used real instruments and recorded real music that you could listen to and feel the people playing the music? This album is like that. It is sonically rich and textured.

In a time when so many great artists are relying on excessive studio polish to remove all the soul from their music (cough, Metric, cough) or are forgoing traditional songwriting and creation in order to facilitate their artist excesses using bullshit electronics (Radiohead, here, again, under my blade), it's such a relief to hear a band that actually plays their instruments, and isn't scared to let people hear how fucking awesome and alive they sound.

It is a shame that from "Dory" onward the album takes this long slow graceful nosedive into the ground. It's on purpose, but for what purpose I don't know, but all I know is that we've got an album of six really strong songs and then three songs that suck all the energy the first half the album gave you right out of you and then stomps on it.

It's OK: I am not the "album listener" I once was. Those tracks will fall away and my memory of Veckatimest will be untainted by the meandering the closing tracks do. Regardless, this is a beautiful album, musically, that should be listened to through the highest quality gear you can muster. Enjoy!

This is a fun song to try to parse. People on SongMeanings seem to be split between it being about a guy getting cheated on by his girl, or a guy who got over-dramatic and dumped his lady only later to realize his mistake. What do I think? I think it's about how love is a fucked up mess, and how Jack White can occasionally write really incredible lyrics.

I had a friend for a while who attached himself to this song while he was feeling all emo over some girl he hadn't even kissed or slept with. She decided she liked someone else more, or something, liked him less, anyway.

I don't have a lot to say about this song. For a while I thought it was about cheating women, but for a while I thought everything was about cheating women, so I'm not really a good judge. Now I just think it's got a good mood to it, and the lyrical gymnastics are inspiring. (Though not on par with some of the literary stuff Harvey Danger does on occasion...)

It's Saturday! My week has been fuckin' wild. I dig it. It's like a rollercoaster: the climbs are suspenseful with great views and the drops are exhilarating. Rock 'n roll.

A wise man once told me that kept money isn't much fun. (I, somewhat unfortunately, can't remember if this was @leftsider, both wise men who have told me numerous wise things.) That little morsel of wisdom has been sitting in my head for a while now, slowly snowballing into some vast personal mantra I am sure I will unleash on people in terms of stunning polarization. Until then, though...

Last night the absurdity of some of my relationships dawned on me, yet again, in the typical sorrow inducing way it always does, "Why do I continue to become involved with people I know I don't want to be with for any extended period of time?" Isn't the point to go out and find the one, in the strictest How I Met Your Mother sense of the word? Isn't being with anyone else just wasting time until you find that one?

I keep focusing on the desire to expunge myself of expectations beyond the very basics that I need to keep going. I'm reminding myself that the past doesn't necessarily always predict the future, and a belief in that turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts because we subconsciously manipulate the world around us. So, for the most part, I am trying to forget that it all ends in sorrow, but not expect anything but good times tomorrow.

It's tough, because it always comes back to this one point: Even if I'm happy, aren't I just wasting my time if I really know that it won't last, based on personal reasons that have nothing to do with expectation or past calamity?

I asked myself this, and then thought about time in terms of a commodity, because that's what it is, that's how we treat it, time is, well, time is money, and kept money isn't much fun.

I started thinking about all my friends who don't do anything with their time. Either they're scared of the world, or scared of injury, or scared of hurt, or any number of things that they won't (or will) admit to themselves. People who spend all their time on their own, or saying no to experiences they've deemed too out of the ordinary for their realm of experience. People who spend their time talking shit on things they've never done. What do all these people have in common?

They've got huge fucking stores of time. Days upon days of time that they spend doing nothing with themselves all because they think it's better that way, safer that way, cleaner that way, happier that way. They don't realize the folly of it all: at least kept money stays in one place, it'll be there when you want it, but kept time disappears as soon as it happens.

Every minute you don't spend ends up being a minute lost. Kept time isn't any fun at all. Start thinking about your hours in terms of dollars. If you get paid $15 (or whatever) per hour at your job, start imagining that your life is a job, too, and you need to start living hours that are worth $15 each. Stop doing shit that isn't worth it, and start raping the value from your time. Unlike money, of which there can always be more of if you work for it, your time is finite and nonrenewable.

Go out there and spend some time, people. That's your lesson for the day.

Elliott Smith wrote love songs, but they weren't about women, they were about drugs. It's easy to mistake the two, women and drugs, when written about in songs, because they pretty much cause the same emotions: longing, sorrow, regret, desperate need that eventually drives you to murder or suicide. It's easy to listen to this song and think that it's about something other than drugs, which is part of the joy of music, but know this: this song is about doing drugs.

Elliott Smith is a legend. His second album, this one, is legendary. I am not appreciative of his later work, where he gets all swoopy with the string arrangements and everything turns so goddamn grandiose, but this album is probably one of the best ever. It is easily the best album written entirely about drugs, too.

Which is probably why every time I run into someone who is familiar with Elliott Smith (and usually they can even sort of play some of his songs) they are either a former or current drug addict, and not pussy drugs, but Elliott Smith-class drugs, the real shit as it were. Constantina indeed.

I love this song. It's beautiful, haunting, hauntingly beautiful, like most of Elliott's work. If you're reading this site, you've probably heard it before, you're probably familiar and you've fallen in and out of love with it... and if you haven't, then you should. You should have a mad love affair with the whole of the album.

Right now, go.

I don't have a lot of time! You must listen to me very carefully!

Well, no, I just woke up late so I am in a rush. I will probably stop halfway through writing this and finish it later, unbeknownst to you. That is the magic of writing. Maybe one day someone will invent an entertaining way to write live. Sounds like a stand-up comedy act. Hmm. I will sit on this one. Forget that you read anything!

Twice now I've forgotten what I was going to write about. Something based on a tweet that I didn't twat, twit, whatever. It was about women. Something about women...

Oh, yes, the twitter was going to be: "When I had low self-confidence I felt like I had to sleep with ugly girls. Now that I have high self-confidence, I want to sleep with the ugly girls just because I can."

See, it's too long for a twitter.

Also, it's really succinct, right there, so what could I possibly say about it? Aside from the fact that...

Well, I don't know.

Men are pigs, we are, and everyone who stands up and goes, "I know a man who is not a pig!" then you are familiar merely with a man who is dishonest with you (or himself) about who he is.

We spend a lot of time assuming that we can take people at face value, and that we assume because we're all so unique as people that our thoughts and experiences are unique, but they're really not. Our combinations of them are unique, our life as a whole, but our experiences are only the same colors of paint that a slurring Keifer Sutherland uses to concoct everyone else's memories just as well. We're all just pawns, living in a circular city, and there is clearly no way to get to Shell Beach. No one ever gets out. It just goes around and around...

All men are pigs, in the same way that all dogs could very easily rip our throats out with their teeth but choose not to. Some men, like some dogs, are neutered, but even they could still rip your throat out.

I'm not sure what I'm going on about.

I made an interesting discovery the other night while I was under the influence of alcohol. I was kissing this girl, and I felt like I wanted to have feelings for her. It was the strangest thing. I didn't feel like I did have feelings for her, but that I had an intense desire to, in the future, perhaps feel something for her. (For extra prac_tice_ I am going to italicize a cou_ple_ things here, just to make sure I still remember how to close tag_s_.) I think I am screwed up in the head. When I sobered up it went away. Thank goodness. Feelings are scary.

Women are crazy. I mean, crazy delicious. I mean, some of them are, anyway.

Goddamn! I have nothing to say!

I was going on about the variety of women, there are, in the world, and how they're all different and nothing can be true for all of them. My story was, in short, that years ago I dated a girl who showered "every now and then" and didn't really believe in deodorant and my general reaction ("General Reaction!") to it was, "You best wash yourself before I come over to spend time with you," because she was kind of stanky. And by kind of stanky, I mean, she was damn stanky. Even after a shower she was kind of stanky.

Since then I've always been pretty big on hygiene. Ladies who don't shower every day are gross, was the rule.

But just recently I've had the pleasure of experiencing a woman who smells fucking incredible and it turns out she doesn't show every day. Maybe every other couple of days. I was floored. How? How is one girl stanky shit when unshowered, and another smells fucking amazing?

Point is, women are rad. They're all so different from one another. I've been with a girl with shaky hands. They were nice, etc.

I'm watching John from Cincinnati. This show floors me. I'm going to go ahead and say it's my favorite bit of television filmed so far. (Though Day Break with Taye Diggs was fucking sick as shit.)

Today is a day of flooring.

Enjoy your holiday!

So, I fucked up yesterday, by not posting a song. So, this is going up in it's stead.

I couldn't stop listening to this song the other day. I wish I could find lyrics to it, because I swear it sounds like they say "A HORSE STATUE WILL APPEAR, A GEESE ..." and so on, but I am not sure. It doesn't matter: it's got the same kind of vibe that Ed is a Portal does, those Lovecraftian reference's that Akron/Family seem to be down with.

Yes, it hasn't even been a week since I posted a song from this album, but I figure today can be considered a "bonus day" since I was a bit late. The mood on it is too great, especially in the last frantic three minutes when it turns into a funky prog-rock epic.

Enjoy! I'm glad it took me so long to finally miss a day.

Charles Spearin is a mustached Canadian man who would be better known as a part of both Broken Social Scene and Do Make Say Think, two bands that I am not very appreciative of. Imagine my shock, then, that I enjoy his The Happiness Project so much.

The idea is simple: create songs based around bits of ordinary speech. The whole album is like this, but he has some fun with it on certain tracks, like Vittoria, which made me burst into laughter the first time I heard it. I was going to do a DoubleTake! today and post the song Vittoria as well but I just don't feel it's really necessary. If this track doesn't inspire you to check out the rest of the album, nothing will.

In his own words:

These are my neighbours. My wife and I have two little kids and live downtown Toronto. In the summertime, all the kids in the neighbourhood play outside together and everyone is out on their porch enjoying each other’s company, telling stories and sharing thoughts. A year or so ago, I began inviting some of them over to the house for a casual interview vaguely centered around the subject of happiness. In some cases we never broached the subject directly but nonetheless my friends began to call it my 'Happiness Project.' After each interview I would listen back to the recording for moments that were interesting in both meaning and melody. By meaning I mean the thoughts expressed, by melody I mean the cadence and inflection that give the voice a singsong quality. It has always been interesting to me how we use sounds to convey concepts. Normally, we don’t pay any attention to the movement of our lips and tongue, and the rising and falling of our voices as we toss our thoughts back and forth, just as we don’t pay attention to the curl and swing of the letters as we read. I wanted to see if I could blur the line between speaking and singing and write music based on these accidental melodies. So, I had some musician friends play these neighborhood melodies as close as they could on different instruments (the tenor saxophone as Mrs. Morris, the harp as Marisa, etc.) and then I arranged them as though they were songs. The result is a beautiful and unique collection of songs, blissfully blurring the lines between jazz, folk, indie rock, and inspirational improvisation.

This song feeds, of course, into my recent blatherings, which I will spare you. (Really, I just deleted 2 paragraphs of blathering.)

It's just amazing to me how good this song feels. It's not my style, whatever my style is, and I guess that's because it's jazzy? I don't know, but it feels good. Each section of it is a minor revelation of feeling, bird chirps and horns. If Spearin was shooting for happiness, I think he caught it right in the face. Good job!

Enjoy your Saturday! And every other day, for that matter!

I'm stuck in an emotional loop: I'm upset that I am getting attacked from almost all sides on this internet thing by people who have known me for a long time on it, and part of me doesn't really understand it, because all I'm trying to do is encourage, lead by example. Is there something wrong with being excited about life? Why does stating it cause people to start listing reasons you shouldn't be happy?

Luckily reality is a much better experience than the internet. In reality I have friends who act like friends, you know, they're nice, and they don't talk down on you. I've noticed, most of my friends I've got now I made in the last year or so, and they all seem to like me and appreciate who I am. (The friends in real life who didn't seem to like me, I stopped spending time with naturally just because of time constraints.)

The internet people, however, and we'll just extend this to say, instead: The people who have known me the longest seem to be the least appreciative of my latest attitudes. I think it's an issue of preconceived notions: they got used to me being a certain way, and now that I am changing and they're staying exactly the same they're offended. "How dare this guy do what I can't!"

Or I'm just self-centered and for some reason they're just so absolutely bored and have nothing better to do with their time than insult me on the internet. Which, I think, still makes me the winner.

When I talk about the things I do on my livejournal, or I twitter what I'm up to, and I use superfluous words like, "I am awesome!" and "This thing I am doing is awesome!" or "This girl I am fucking is awesome!" what I really mean is:

This shit is awesome! You should do it!

I'm not trying to convey to the world: Hey, look at me, come suck my dick. The other night someone tried to say the only reason I learned how to ride freeline skates was so that I could do something cool that other people couldn't. I said, "No, because then I wouldn't be encouraging you guys to learn how to do them too."

When I got into an argument with one of my internet friends about them, his stance was "they're stupid" and I spent all my time trying to make him understand that nothing is stupid, but he didn't get that. I tried to make him understand how I feel about them, but his only reply was that they were gay and unpopular. I tried to draw parallels, so maybe he could link an emotion he has about something with the way that I feel. Then it dawned on me: this guy has absolutely no idea how I feel. Maybe he's never actually felt this way about something.

And that makes me sad.

If there's one thing I want to do, it's figure out how to help people feel awesome. You should feel awesome all the time. Based on the outline I've been constructing in my head, there are a lot of steps to achieving a consistent feeling of awesomeness, but we'll start with something related to this:

Misery is the same for everyone. When you're sad, it's generally the same sort of sad that everyone else feels. No one feels a different kind of sad when a lover leaves them, it hurts basically the same way for everyone. You're never alone when you're sad, because everyone has been there, unless they haven't. This means that your sorrow is not unique. There is nothing about you that is genuinely sadder than another person. You're not less motivated than the next sad sack, even if he's skinny and has good skin and you're fat and covered in acne. That guy is just as fucked up as you are. I promise you.

Happiness is different for everyone. This is why misery is a great uniter, why such large groups can exist based around a central complaint, because everyone can feel the same sort of sadness, the same sort of anger, but happiness is a tricky beast to handle. You can't just get ten random people in the room and have them all agree on what makes them happy, but you can get them all bitching about their exes if you prompt them.

We did a little experiment in a psychology class I took once, where we were separated into two groups based on our shoes. One group wore flipflops and generally open shoes, and my group were wearing regular shoes or boots. We were told to list the differences as to why we thought the other group wore shoes different than ours. Once we were done, both lists started rather benignly, but then gradually grew more and more insulting. I thought this was mainly amusing because, in my group, I was the person who said, "Guys, we have to start being mean, or else this will be boring." We easily found a common ground to harmonize on: anger, sadness, and negativity. We had these things in common.

Maybe this song isn't about being unhappy. There's a reason you can put this song on when you're driving down the road and it can make you feel good. Tom Petty isn't singing about how you can't possibly understand his misery, because you can, that's why you can relate to that perspective on the song. You do know how it feels, as it were. What you don't know is how he feels happy, what drives him to keep going. Maybe it's simple, like rolling a joint with a good friend and driving somewhere with the radio loud, just enjoying the company and the wind in your hair.

If there's something to take from this, it's these things:

1.) No matter who you are and what you're going through, chances are you're an arm's length away from someone who has gone through something similar. You're never alone in the pain you feel, and this should give you strength to move away from pitying yourself and your situation. Millions of people have moved past it, you can, too, so buck up.

2.) It's going to be difficult to find people who share your happiness. It's going to be especially difficult because it seems to be hard to find out what really makes you happy, and a lot of things in your life will hold you back from it (poor relationships, filling your time with things merely meant to pass it as quickly as possible) but once you figure it out, start waving it around and see if there are other people already in your life who think that is happiness for them, too. The people who don't share your perspective on happiness, especially if they aren't appreciative and try to hold you back from it, will have to be disposed of. You can do this however you like. Have enough respect for yourself to not allow people into your life who don't respect you.

3.) Nobody really wants to hear about your happiness. Seeing it is much more effective. Unhappy people like to feel alienated, it keeps them unhappy, so the best thing you can do with them is make them feel completely welcome and comfortable by being completely at ease yourself. This will annoy the piss out of them but eventually it'll become infectious and they'll like to be around you. When it doubt, shut the fuck up about yourself. (Fat people don't like to hear about how much weight you lost recently. Poor people don't like to hear about or even see how much money you have.) It's a good rule.

Good luck! Unless something interesting happens to me today I figure my next couple songs will be coupled with entries kind of like this one. It's this one-track mind of mine.

My new goal is to convince people that they should chase after the things that would make them feel good about themselves. I've spent this last week running into people who seem to think that all these external forces mean a lot. "My viewpoint is justifiable because others have it." "Things that are widely popular have more value." "I won't do that because I think it's for children."

Mostly I got into a fight with a long-term internet friend, and otherwise I occasionally hang out with people who's favorite pass time seems to be to talk shit on everything that passes in front of them. When it comes to the internet friend, I told him to fuck off, because clearly there's not a lot of "friend" in "internet friend" when all they can do is say bad things about your interests. With the people I deal with in reality and can't just stop talking to, I'm trying to keep an open mind.

Clearly these people hate themselves.

It's understandable. They're losers. They back up their shit talk with arguments and justifications that merely make them look worse, such as calling age an issue ("I'm too grown up to do THAT, but I will play videogames!") or citing difficulty level (because clearly anything that is hard to learn isn't worth doing) or even saying such activities seem like a waste of time (even though they'll gladly sit for hours in front of a television set).

So, what can I do? What is the problem with these people? How did they wind up full of so many reasons not to do things? Have they spent their whole lives talking themselves out of doing things they enjoy, so now it's just natural that they try to bag on everyone else's interests?

My friends who are merely sad, who aren't raging assholes, seem to suffer from a similar problem, except it's directed inwardly. The things they enjoy aren't "acceptable" for various reasons so they don't do them, and spend all their time wishing they would. A lot of the time the reasons are foolish: It would take too much time (it'll take even longer if you keep waiting). I'm too fat to start (then start losing weight now?). I don't have the time (how about you turn off the television or stop browsing the net for hours for no reason?). I would look foolish or people wouldn't appreciate what I do (who the fuck cares! be a fucking adult!).

Think about the things that you spend your day doing, and think about what do you do that actually makes you happy. What do you do when you first wake up in the morning? I used to sit on the internet for a couple hours, randomly browsing stuff and reading things. Did this make me happy? No. It helped my bide time to get through my day. Reading books make me happy, but I was allowing myself to be distracted by something that didn't actually make me feel accomplished at all. Accomplishment makes me feel something, probably you too, so maybe you should look for that.

Other than that, when I was at home, I'd play video games, which I think are turning into an even bigger waste of time than the internet and television as a whole. The purpose of a videogame is to fill you with a false sense of accomplishment, and it is false, because it wanes very quickly and the actual feeling is completely empty. I didn't actually do anything, but I did something. Now I'll go play a different game and do something different all over again but by doing the same thing.

It's the ultimate idiot machine. So many people sit around and get fat, loading themselves up on all this false accomplishment, when they could challenge themselves to games that improve themselves in the real world. Instead of getting a high score in Halo 3 today, how about you see how many times you can walk around the block before you get tired? It's surprising, but exercise actually helps increase confidence, especially when you're doing it when striving for a goal. Slowly increase the number of push ups you can do on a daily basis.

Just... if you see something that you think you'd like to do, then do it. Don't make excuses, don't put it off, just do it. Sometimes you can't just immediately jump into things (flying a plane, swimming across the Bering Strait) but those things require practice and discipline and that, all by itself, is fun, too.

Next time you want to sit around and play a game of Halo with your buddies, go to a park and throw a baseball around, or kick a soccer ball back and forth. Go outside and enjoy your life. If you spend too much time sitting around not doing anything, you're just going to forget what living is all about and waste your time (while telling others their lives are wastes of time) wishing you were different from the way you are. Stop being scared!

Practice writing, start jogging, talk to more women/men, figure skate, do yoga, take skydiving lessons, read a book, sit and think about the life you've lived and how lucky you are to still be alive. Now, fucking use it. Go out there and be an awesome sexy person. Listen to music, love somebody, be loved by somebody.

Relax and live, people. There aren't any mulligans in real life. You've got one shot at every day, and you better nail it. If you keep lying to yourself by telling yourself that it's OK that you didn't do "that one thing" today, then you're cheating yourself out of a whole lot of awesome.

Song Note: This album is named after The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation's Millennium General Assembly, which is an elaborate work of "art" built entirely in private by a simple dude who was maybe a little bit crazy, but damn if he didn't do what made him happy: building this stuff out of junk for 6 hours a night for over 14 years. Good for him.

Today was a lousy day. That's not why this is late, and I'm not sure if this would be any different if I had written it 7 hours ago at the normal time.

Some days you just wake up and you know they're going to be bad. It's not so much waking up on the wrong side, it's not your disposition, but it's just a looming dread that horrible things are going to happen to you all day that are entirely out of your control. Then they do happen, and it sucks a lot.

In short! I should not have gotten out of bed today.

But all in all I am happy with how the day has gone, and where it will probably lead. There was a rough patch there, and it was pretty damn rough really quickly all out of nowhere, but then everything was fine.

Look, I just wrote about a whole lot of nothing. Pretty cool.

This song is kind of about nothing, which is fitting, I guess. It's just, like, you know, emotive. Like, "fuck the shit that sucks, I'm still here, and maybe I'm gonna be happy about it just to spite you. but also, fuck you."

Insert some sort of commentary about how I don't like Grandaddy right here. OK? Cool.

Going to go eat some pizza now.

For all the passion I have for several of Akron/Family's songs, I've never really considered myself a fan of their albums. It usually ends up just being one or two songs I take from each album (or in the case of Meek Warrior, I took none and hardly listened to the thing) and love intensely (Ed Is A Portal) or merely enjoy within the mix of the rest of my music (Before & Again) or just listen to for the novelty (Running, Returning's wailing at the end of the track always makes people in my car go "what the fuck who would listen to a cat dying?").

And, so far, I'm going to say my reaction to Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free is going to be largely similar. I haven't even gotten through a complete listen yet, so I can't say for sure, but I already know one of the songs is obnoxious and I'll never want to listen to it.

My point is, Akron/Family crafts songs that are pure genius and then they fuck around, I think maybe just because they can. When I saw them live, they had a three night residency at the Center for Inquiry West, they did sort of the same thing: they lured the crowd into a marvelous groove by playing this song and others that have a somewhat danceable beat. At one point most of the crowd was dancing around a little bit to them.

But then the tone shifted, and the second half of the set turned into an overwhelming noisy experimental explosion where you could hear bits and pieces of songs taking shape but then they would distort them back into repetitious noise. By the end of the set, no one had walked out, but only because we were all waiting for the band to take a turn back into the beautiful stuff they had been playing earlier, a turn that they never took, leaving most of us (I think) scratching our heads as to what just happened.

When I saw them at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum they did no such thing, but that was prior to the departure of guitarist Ryan Vanderhoof. If I had to choose between the two live shows, the Natural History Museum one was far superior, and the version of Ed Is A Portal they played their was inspiring, while the version at the Center of Inquiry left me feeling kind of empty.

Still, I bought one of their shirts, and a set of their pens. The shirt is now one of my favorites, being some sort of 50/50 blend from American Apparel, it is an absolute joy to wear and I love it. I wear the pen with this album's art on it on my jacket, because what could be cooler than a tie-dye flag?

The point of this post, however, wasn't to talk about the band, and for all intents and purposes I should probably just erase all that, but I won't. The point of this post is, quite simply:

This song is fucking awesome.

Oh my fucking god, it is so awesome!

I love it when I get excited about music, because it makes me feel like I could burst, and this song does this. It's just so... beautiful, you know, man? This song reminds me of what it feels like to be in love; to live a day that was so powerful that you can't help but smile at the end of it all. It's a sunset on an empty beach; it's staring into a pretty girl's eyes and actually being able to see her in them; it's sitting around a fire with a bunch of friends after spending a long and entirely pleasant adventurous day together, clearing the day out of your lungs and head; it's lying in the back of your car with a girl at a drive-in theater. This song is all these things, to me, right now.

Thank you, Akron/Family, for taking me to places in my mind that the day has yet to carry me to, for inspiring my feet to take me to places that remind me of the way this song makes me feel. Thank you for making music that can make me feel full of life even when I'm just driving around by myself.

In 1986, Dan Rather was attacked by William Tager in New York City, who believed that Rather had been taken control of by the media. Whilst beating Rather, Tager repeatedly shouted, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?"

According to Michael Stipe, this song is more about someone desperately trying to understand what motivates youth culture but coming up empty handed over and over again.

Most importantly this song contains the line:

you said that irony was the shackles of youth

Which is so sad because it's true.

I've always secretly hoped I would somehow turn "what's the frequency?" into slang for "what's going on?" but it just feels unnatural to say. It sounds cool, but... it hasn't got that west coast vibe.

Have a fun Monday.

Even though I've got a ---- shit, I got up and walked away to butter my toast and I can't remember what I was going ---- oh! ---- a headache and this song doesn't help much with that through these shitty laptop speakers, I am going to continue my "in praise of women" theme from yesterday with this one. How else could you possible follow up such an obtuse XTC track anyway? Let's do a 180.

That bitchy sarah chick who comments on here introduced me to this song back when I was putting my penis in her. Literally, while I was putting my penis in her, she was like, "Oh, this song..."

I saw Nine Inch Nails last night, and, somewhat unfortunately, part of Jane's Addiction's set, which I wish hadn't been unfortunate, but Perry Ferrell looked like a gigantic asshole and I wish I had a picture I could link you to because there is no way to accurately describe how ridiculous he looked. Also, every time the music died down and you could hear him sing resulted in a lot of people getting up from their front row seats (which were expensive! let me tell you!) and leaving with disgusted looks on their faces.

To tell you the truth I kind of liked them and if I hadn't been so tired I would have enjoyed staying to hear Been Caught Stealing and I feel kind of like an asshole now that I didn't. I'm just glad to have seen Jane's Addiction because I can easily dupe people into thinking I am cool now.

"Yeah I saw Jane's Addiction," I will say, casually, with no real intonation.

Then the second party could say, "Wow, dude, you saw Jane's Addiction?" and I'll know they like them based on their enthusiastic usage of italics, and I can respond,

"Fuck yeah, dude, they fucking rocked!" and that person will think I'm rad.

Or they could go, "Oh,, really? Jane's Addiction? Weren't they cool like... ten years ago?" and I can say,

"Yeah they pretty much sucked. Perry Ferrell was dressed like an asshole. Dave Navarro can shred on a guitar like a fucking God though, Jesus, that dude, fuck. He's like a little time capsule of the 1990's all on his own, he looks exactly the same."

Rock 'n roll, it's Sunday!

This is one of my favorite songs to sing, whether I am listening to it or not, but there is just something fun about it. In particularly I love this line.

I'm on my knees but dancing!

That sums up just about every extreme feeling I've ever had toward a woman, emotionally or physically. I was on my knees but dancing last night.

This album is Volume 2 of Apple Venus. On Day 16 I posted a song off that album, I Can't Own Her, yet another song about longing for females.

Apple Venus and Wasp Star are two incredibly fine albums full of a lot of excellent songs. They're clearly the work of a pair of highly accomplished songwriters, being the only remaining members of XTC at the time, Andy Partridge (one of the greatest, if not the greatest, living voice in pop music) and Colin Moulding (who's aged voice has become incredibly soothing to hear). Everything is paced and balanced wonderfully. Apple Venus' opener, River of Orchids is beautiful. The song that appears on Wasp Star after this one, The Wheel and the Maypole is the perfect follow up, and the perfect way to end the series of albums.

If there's one thing that I can complain about when it comes to XTC, it's that other people look at me like I am fucking crazy when I listen to them (the same goes for most of Peter Gabriel's work), but I think that is just because I am a victim of my age, of surrounding myself with people my age who listen to, say, Mudvayne, and, uh, KoRn. In short, XTC's music, I love it, I love these two albums, I love almost every song off of them, but I don't get to listen to them much because I end up skipping them instinctively while others are in the car.

But it's OK, because I can sit down any time I want and lose myself in the cacophony of these albums, and I even get choice: Do I listen to to the lovely sweeping beauty of Apple Venus, or do I listen to the more rock-oriented Wasp Star and bounce around like a giddy school child?

A lie for a lie, but a truth for the truth...

It's true, the Church of Women will have you give praise with a laugh, bark, and stutter.

Oh, extra note: it's fun to listen to these two albums and hear all the little guttural grunts and stutters that Andy Partidge punctuates all the songs with. As far as I can remember it's not prevalent on any XTC record up until this one. The stutter is obviously obvious, and the occasional "ung"s he elicits... but if you listen even closer, with some good speakers, you can hear background grunts and groans really low in the mix. Kind of fun. Lots of layers to this stuff.

I wish I didn't like Vampire Weekend, they're so... popular, you know. And the way they dress? It's so... Banana Republic. I can't stand it. (I know you planned it.)

But goddamn if their music isn't fucking awesome.

A-Punk made it into my Best of 2008 playlist ahead of this song, which is unfortunate because I like this one more.

This is a lovely song about distance.

Not a lot of words today, either, damnit. Someone needs to piss me off or something bad needs to happen to me. Tonight there's supposed to be some "lingerrave" tonight, going to go to gawk at women wearing nearly nothing, maybe there will be an interesting story in that. I don't know.

I am lonely and awed. There are no words for this, except for endless repetition of the past.

TGIF ETC.

I can't believe it's been 6 years since Harvey Danger has released a new album. This is really sad. I hope that Sean or any of the other guys read this and have a sudden deep understanding of how sorrowful a lack of new material makes me and decide to band back up and crank out another album as wonderful as Little By Little is. You hear me, guys? I want more albums. I want to go see you play at Spaceland again. I want to be amazed by how frickin' unbelievably tall Sean Nelson is all over again. Can you do that?

Harvey Danger did something awesome before everyone else did, too, back in 2004. They released the MP3s and FLACs for this album entirely for free on their website (and while I can't check right now I am pretty sure you can still grab it for free) and offered some really rad packages for people who wanted to give them money. For $24 (IIRC) I got a t-shirt, the CD with a bonus disc of good stuff (Picture, Picture is an amazing song that's worth the $20 already) in nice packaging, a set of pins, and a sticker. How cool is that? I actually bought the set while the album downloaded.

Why this song today? Because happiness is boring. I'm happy this morning, and it always leaves me with absolutely nothing to say. Yay, everything is awesome, yadda yadda. This song is about how happiness leaves no mark, how hard it is to nail down into words and characters, and in the process they write one of the best songs about happiness there is.

This should be one of those songs where people go, "This song is cool! Thanks!"

I just spent all my writing time reading this article in the LA Times about a couple of kids who ride trains like hobos. It's a fun story (in a way) and it made my eyes tear up a little bit. It's got a lot of nice details:

Freedom to roam the country's 140,000 miles of freight track meant being at the mercy of a fixed grid. Once, they gambled on the wrong boxcar and found themselves stuck in Wichita, Kan., in winter, a place so miserably cold they risked escape in a locomotive engine.

They ate from trash bins and begged on street corners. For shelter, they threw their sleeping bags under bridges and pried the plywood from the windows of abandoned houses. They shared three bottles of cheap whiskey a day. They found a stray husky they named Captain Morgan and a rabbit they called Dinner.

I also read this article about student lawyers trying to get three-strikes inmates released when their childhoods are especially horrible.

At 11, he was discovered by social workers alone with a younger sister in their South Los Angeles home overrun by flies. Windows were broken out. Trash cans were filled with rotting garbage. The bathroom was filthy and reeked of excrement. There was no food in the home.

Social workers took the youngest children, including Norman, into custody. He and some of his siblings told the workers that they had been raped by friends of their mother's, according to court records. His mother's boyfriend whipped him with electrical cords.

So, what did we learn? If you read both articles, you should take away this completely sound conclusion: When you treat your children like you're their friend, you end up with kids unable to cope with reality and run from it. When you treat your children like crap, they wind up end jail. And when you treat them with benign indifference, they start blogs!

Benign indifference FTW!

Really late on getting to this today, not a lot of thoughts going on. Also, instrumental tracks aren't really big on personal associations, especially when it's a song like this, meant to be bumped at high volumes with a big ass woofer shakin' the windows.

People are supposed to get naked to this, and by people I mean "eastern european gypsies", shakin' their asses, getting busy around the fire pit or whatever. I don't know.

I have felt emo all day!

Yeah, sorry, there are no words. I've sat here for two hours now. Just listen to the song!

I discovered this band because Cory Doctorow blogged about them. I only really like two songs: this one, and God Doesn't Take American Express, which is just as clever and offbeat as this one. The rest of the album struck me as rather feh, and to be honest, both of the other songs, this one included, sometimes strike me as annoying due to how discordant they are in some ways.

I was discussing guitar with a buddy last night and I said something about how I'm curious to see where my influences will take me when I learn how to make music, because I listen to such a wide variety of music that I don't think I could possibly mash them all up together.

Then it dawned on me, right now, Sophe Lux is what it sounds like when you don't filter your influences. This song has everything, from eastern european gypsy music to a blues solo to a sort of metal-like "vibe" (if no one will chastise me for that) with an overall glam aesthetic and it all sounds like one big hot mess. It's almost brilliant, but not quite there. Sophe Lux is an amalgamation of so many different influences, styles and eras, that it's almost impossible to categori... wait a second...

Sophe Lux is the hipster equivalent of a band! Oh my god!

This is hipster rock.

So I still can't get yesterday's song out of my head. Just seeing the title makes me go "do do do do do do do do!"

I figured I'd follow up yesterdays oddity with another oddity out of my collection, courtesy of Josephine Foster & The Supposed. This occupies a weird fringe of my taste: catchy yet discordant songs. Marissa Nadler (who is actually more accessible) and Rasputina fall into this category right along with Foster.

A good friend of mine, who has known me since we were both two, said upon hearing this song, "This is the kind of music that I imagine you listening to while you drive down the street," which was fitting because we were listening to it while driving down the street but it has stuck with me: I do turn this up and drive around with all the windows down. I wonder what people think.

When I lived in San Diego I was listening to Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile (by The Beach Boys, if you're dense) a lot and I used to blast it, and during one of the many sections of high pitched harmonizing a couple on a motorcycle shouted at me, "HEY! WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO?"

"THE BEACH BOYS!"

"OH, COOL, RIGHT ON MAN!"

I've been back in LA for over four years now and no one ever asks me what I am listening to. LA county sucks. I can't wait until I start repeating stories unknowingly on this website. Maybe I've already told this one? I will have to start checking. Not today though, I will not start today.

Yesterday I rode around on one of these things:

And it was awesome. In two hours I effectively mastered it. Then I went home so dehydrated that I woke up hungover. Yes, a Ripstik gave me a hangover. This is why people should drink water. Fuck.

I'm going to go buy one now, because I haven't spent enough money this month between a whole new speaker system, a new guitar, and now a fucking ripstik board. Man.

And one day I will be alone again, or something, etc, etc, to tie it all together.

I don't like Animal Collective. I've tried, because everyone seems to like them, but for the most part I just find them boring. I don't know how accurate I am in saying this, because it's been a while (since their last release) since I sat down with an Animal Collective record, but most of their songs totally lack anything resembling a hook, and I just can't... I can't listen to music that doesn't practically force me to sing along with it.

That's another thing that's important to me, that pretty much every song posted here has in common: there's at least some part of the song, it might only be a line or two, that I can't help but sing when it occurs. Sometimes it's the whole song. I should start I identifying specific parts of songs I like to sing, just for shiggles.

In this song it's "bad mind let me put on good habits / been working to put on good habits / sometimes I can't find my good habits" that is the effective 'hook' of the song for me. It doesn't matter to me that the rest of the song is practically unintelligible nonsense, because so many sections of the song are catchy. Pretty much every part.

It's also fucking nuts, but still ends up being something you can seriously rock out to.

If you're curious about the lyrics, there are several wrong variations on Songmeanings, but the official ones direct from the bad, typos and misspelled words (and first line that doesn't sound at all like what is written) and all, are right here (and down the page on SongMeanings).

Hungry Bears in Butter Hustle You'll be doing it a while livers only fail Where's your relaxation? Where's the time required for your health Been hating on my new perspective. Been Hurrying along no meal is ever done But you could win a Rabbit you could win a rabbit or a rib The fast Child is gonna have a dead hand We can get him started YEAH Bad mind let me put on good habbits been working to put on good habbits some times I can't find my good habbits. Do Do Do Do Do (the most important part) Spanish Bands Use all the echo Persion Kitties better stay out of the train Glad you brought your food on Eat it like it's gonna get a way Coffe sure is getting colder seats are getting fewer space is losing place Is for winning rabbits here's to berlin habbits with a ripple Rabbit or a Habbit? Habbit or a Rib?

1. Geek Note:

Today I managed to upload the song and write everything from my laptop leeching 3G internet from my G1 via USB using PDAnet. I've tried doing this in the past but couldn't figure out how to get the directory list of all my music, because the reception at my house is so spotty that the connection times out before it can get the whole thing. Kind of lame. Today I put my phone on a high point by my window (on top of a large ceramic box profile of my head) and then used 1and1's admin tools "web space explorer" (basically a in-browser windows explorer for your server) to rename the song appropriately. It only occurs to me now that I could have just renamed the song in advance. Holy shit.

2. Life Note:

I bought myself a Takamine GS330S acoustic guitar the other day and after two days of playing it I will say: Dang, my fingers hurt. Also, for all the music I listen to, I have no fucking rhythm. No natural timing at all. I'm going to spend today listening to a metronome and practice changing between the several chords I know now and hopefully download some good scale charts (anyone have any recommendations?) and practice those, too. My lofty goal of playing Two-Headed Boy on the first day of having it went right out the window when I realized that F major is unbelievably hard to finger. Way harder to finger than that girl who was disgusted by her vagina and didn't want me to touch it.

3. Site Note:

Yes this is turning a bit into a journal. I don't figure anyone cares, you're probably all used to it by now. Tell me if I am boring or not. I told good winter to stop posting pictures of himself on his tumblr because they were harshing my mellow, so I'd expect the same from you people. Imagine "you people" said with copious amounts of disdain. A plethora of disdain, if you will, you... people.

I spend a lot of time explaining to people that, yes, I like music a lot, but no, I don't play music. I frequently go, "God! I wish my parents had forced me to play an instrument when I was younger!" They claimed that after making both my sisters play brass instruments and the constant battle it was getting them to do it at all, that they decided with me that they wouldn't force me to do much of anything, including useful things like "learn piano" or "learn to play guitar" or "learn to do anything that might result in better chances of getting laid, like having confidence, and knowing how to be nice to people".

This isn't even day 150 [Actually, it is day 150! -Ed], but I'm starting to feel a little inspired by this project. It's not often (ever) that I've set something up and then stuck with it past the uninspiring grind slump of however not-that-long-ago it was. I had the idea, then I sat on it for a little while constantly thinking about the best way to do it, and then BOOM I set it up all at once and look at me go! You're reading this right now, whether I know you personally or not, so in the end, I win! Yay! I win at the internet.

But, the point is, maybe I do have follow through. The last two years has done enough to slowly bolster my confidence that it seems feasible that long-term goals are worth striving for. It'll be awesome when I hit Day 365, even though updating this website has turned into a bit of a pain in my ass now that I don't have internet at home. I'm slowly weening myself off obsessively hanging out with people, especially when they're boring, so I'm getting a lot of me time at home.

Only problem is that it's really difficult to turn me time into "do something productive like read a book" instead of "sit around and stare at the walls and think about things" which has seemed to become my favorite pass time. Sometimes I get home at night and instead of going inside I just sit in my car for half an hour thinking about shit. What do I think about? Exactly what you're reading right here, except I'm not writing it down so I just think it in circles.

So I'm trying to teach myself how to manage my time better. I read through half of Masters of Doom the other night in probably the longest non-headache inducing marathon reading session I've ever done. I've always been a slow reader, even though I love to do it, and am easily daunted by huge books. So, naturally my next book I read will be the 800 page Illuminatus! Trilogy which I have been dying to read for years since I am a devout follower of the Principia Discordia fnord.

It dawned on me recently that songs played on guitar are made of these things called chords and that there are a lot of of them but most of the shit I listen to uses like, maybe five at once. Then, after watching a sixteen year old girl with braces strum away at an Against Me! song and it sounded really cool, I started to think: I'm 24! Why don't I play guitar? Goddamnit why didn't I realize this shit when I was 19? I could be a guitar player by now! What the fuck!

So I've got lots of free time, and I'm trying to prevent myself from just staring off into space. Eventually, hopefully, if I at some point decide to ween myself away from my near three year addiction to Twitter, I'll stop being so goddamn ambiently aware of the internet and dedicate my time more fully to other cooler non-internet like things. Like playing guitar. Scoring bitches. Riding dirty. Or something.

I see it this way, now, and it's hard to hold onto because I've got 13 years of straight internet addiction under my belt, but I wonder: Why did I spend so many hours of my day staring at the internet? Getting lost in Wikipedia? Is this really what we're killing print media for? Maybe there's only so much shit we need to know about, you know?

At work yesterday I got a little bored so I went to what was typically my "I'm bored, let's check shit out" bookmark: Popular twitter bookmarks on Delicious, and I opened one of the many guides on "How to best use Twitter" or whatever they are written by some blowhard media expert, and they kept talking about how you should visualize what your twitter goal is, like, "Do you want a lot of followers?" "Do you want people to find your content interesting?" and I had to close it.

Who gives a fuck! What good will "winning" at Twitter ever do you? I was happy when I hit 1,000 followers, and it was kind of work to get there, but what difference did it really make in my life? None.

I have too much time on my hands and I've been pissing it away, sitting on the internet, thinking about the internet. I've made cool friends through Twitter, so I don't want to say that part is invaluable, but what good does any of it really do me?

The internet has uses, and I need to treat it that way: updating this site, discovering new music, and work-related endeavors. Why have I spent so many years thinking it was a lifestyle? You can't win at the internet. You can, however, win at real life, by surrounding yourself with good people, good experiences, and maybe, good skills.

Next time you lose an hour or two just "surfing Wikipedia", think about all the other things you could have done instead. Hell, right now, if you sat here and read all this, do you have any idea what you'd be doing right now if the internet didn't exist?

No?

Well, maybe you should find out.

There's a review of this album on Amazon that isn't a review, it's just the kind of thing I typically write on here. It's not even about this song, but some other song.

there are some pavement songs which fit certain moods *perfectly*, and at those times, i don't have a choice but to count them as my favorites. for instance...i was in new york a few springs ago, spending the evening with the girl i'd had a brief-yet-effective romance with the summer before. she was there with a guy; i was there with two other girls, mutual friends. the five of us were in an underground, literal-hole-in-the-wall-type bar, tucked away inside a subway station at 50th street (i think). the bar was called siberia, and was a total punk/russian (prussian?) paradise. every light bulb was red, and there was writing on every inch of the walls and tables. the lone bathroom stall had a gaping three foot hole busted out of the wall on one side, through which you could see only blackness. the sofas had long ago collapsed on their stumpy legs and fallen to the sticky floor, where they laid dejected and off-balance. cushions were missing and the beer was extremely expensive. i got drunk and watched her...got drunk on the beer and the nostalgia both, pressed myself into a musty corner of the couch, and after a while, closed my eyes. there was a jukebox. it was the brightest and biggest thing in the whole place. it had "crooked rain, crooked rain" in it. i played "fillmore jive," wallowed in its brilliant decadence...i played it again then got up and roamed around manhattan for 5 hours. alone and happy.

that night, "fillmore jive" was my favorite pavement song.

I've got nights like this but not like this, memories that I've lost and songs that I can't remember, so many things I can recount because it was too long ago and I didn't know then that I would want to hold onto the memory for as long as possible. I remember having "standing outside a broken phone booth with money in my hand" stuck in my head at 11 years old and walking the playground thinking about how bluesy the whole thing one; wondering why so many fucking people put Journey on the jukebox at a bar when they should all be aware that it reminded me of an ex; hitting 100mph on the interstate listening to The Dodos manic rhythms...

But I've never been to Manhattan! Agh. Fuck my life.

I need more, you know? Why don't I associate this song with some poignant memory? What opportunity did I pass up that would have spawned an interesting story, where did I misstep? Was I supposed to trip last week and break my foot? Would that have given me more?

I'm hungry.

Someone on Songmeanings suggests that this song is about incest. I don't get that from it, but then again, music is all about interpretation (like religious texts) and I suppose if you want to read incest into it, you can. Specifically he states "redefine a perfect function" is what strikes him as particularly incestuous.

At that rate it could be a song about an attempt to re-program Pac-Man that ended disasterously when the ghosts burst out of the machine and started following the programmers around everywhere. Doesn't that make even more sense?

Toadies have been one of my favorite bands for a long time. I was turned onto "Possum Kingdom" when I was fourteen or so by a girl from the internet who used it to describe her horny world view and from that point on I was hooked. Rubberneck was full of the angsty and sinister kind of music that I thirsted for at that point: fast-paced angry guitar rave-ups with vocalist Todd Lewis screaming "You hurt me you bitch!" over and over again; a mixture of religious themes (Backslider), relationships gone horribly awry (Tyler), or just simply crazy schizoid pieces of music that jump all over the place (Mister Love). I was transfixed.

Eventually they released a second album that was largely "feh" and then broke up. They recently reunited (minus original chick bassist) and released an album that I still haven't managed to listen to. It's OK: Toadies are one of those bands that exist almost solely on the strength of their earlier work, when they were young and crazy and weren't yet jaded by the professional recording industry that turned away their first attempt at their second record, back when Todd Lewis was still a kid and was a victim of the kinetic energy of angsty youth.

Luckily they released enough good music in that period to still be legendary.

I was going to write some fiction today, because I cooked up the idea of doing something similar to this but having it be a 2,000+ wordcount piece of fiction every day, but that seems almost wasteful, so I figured I'd just try out writing some fiction today instead of a normal post.

It turns out that not really reading any books for 7 months can cause you to completely forget how to write. I had all this wonderful inspiration built up and marched off to the library (where I am sitting right now) and sat down with vigor (if you can indeed sit with vigor, then clearly I did it) and then promptly turned out under 300 words in about 40 minutes.

And they were lousy words.

So I deleted them and now, instead of lousy fiction, you get to read me bitch about how much of a failure I am.

This guy is the guy from The War on Drugs, who I saw live recently and who were great. He releases solo work that sounds just like The War on Drugs but instead of swaying toward Bruce Springsteen he kind of sways toward Tom Petty on his solo work.

The story I was going to write was going to be about a group of guys going on a road trip and all the boring minutia of the last hour of driving. It was going to have a dramatic climax where the guys get to where they're going only to discover that a giant orange had fallen from the sky and crushed whatever city it was that they were heading for.

I got a trumpet, I know where to thump it.

It's Sunday! Who would have thought we'd have made it this far?

This is a total hippie song. It's kind of cheesy but I love it. It's got a great vibe, very sunny, very California coastline road trip. Smoke a joint, channel the will to fight. Fight against what? I don't know, fight for good stuff. Fuck for peace, etc.

There's only two songs on the whole album that this guy sings on and, in my opinion, they're the only songs on it worth listening to. Not to be harsh but all the other stuff is kind of dreary.

Not much to say today, sorry! Maybe tomorrow.

There are swaths of music history I know nothing about, particularly: REM. I've never sat down and listened to REM, and while I am sure that I one day will, I have no intention of doing it now. I only bring up REM because both the positive reviews of this album on Amazon compare them to REM so I might as well go ahead and quote them and say: This band is like REM mixed with The Byrds.

To me: they're like a softer, melodic The Black Angels, minus all the shoegaze drone, with bit of a Band of Horses vibe thrown in for good measure.

Tulsa's whole album, I Was Submerged, is steeped in an expansive reverb-assisted swirl of sound, but there's one thing that pulls you through the whole album: highly melodic guitar line, which maintains a similar tone across the whole album. It's most apparent on the 85% instrumental track I Feel Great, which I was posting here, which noodles it's way through a contentedly happy guitar riff before breaking into a brief vocal. It's all very relaxing.

On Shaker the guitar is relaxed, like a bunch of guys playing soccer on a mild day. On this song, Mass, the guitar sings, wails, and cries (and you should most definitely turn it up) and eventually mimics the vocal so well that I could be convinced that a well played guitar could very easily replace a vocalist (something that seems inherently wrong to me but damn). Rafter is a Saturday morning song, the kind that carries you home after a late night. #2, the one song on the record with a mood that's some distance from "mellow", is sinister and pushing, with a powerful chorus hook and a bassy distorted guitar underlying the whole thing.

I discovered this album by hearing Rafter on the Park the Van label sampler on Amazon MP3 which you can download for free, natrulich.

I went to a rave last night in San Bernandino and ended up standing in line for two hours, hardly moving, with a group of friends, before we gave up and left. It was a pretty metal Friday night, if you know what I mean. An hour to drive there, two hours to wait, an hour to drive back. Fuck. Yeah.

I'm going to Lake Arrowhead today to freeze my balls off. Have a good one!

P.S. Yesterday I posted one of my favoritest bands ever and it was the lowest traffic day to the site ever! That's a bummer. Here's a single tear: <)

Aaaaanddd...

Here's another to more fully express my true discontent: <)

Choose your own intro:

1.) Let's fuck this month up! This is what the first minute thirty of this song----his magnificent, perfect, wonderful song----is saying. Let's go out and tear May a new asshole! We're not going to sit around and waste May, no! We're going to spend it blowing shit up, getting things done!

2.) I want to somehow queue up the woman from Queens of the Stone Age's Songs from the Deaf who goes, "Now, something you should all drop to your knees for and worship, but you're too stupid to realize it yourself!" at the beginning of this song because I love it that much, and you should too.

It took months for this album to slowly worm it's way into my life, or at least that's the way I remember it. It all started with a review I read on the Allmusic Blog that I can't find now so I can't link to it but believe me, I read it, and I was like, "You know what, I should listen to this album!" It didn't have any influences I was too familiar with (aside from Pavement) but there was comment in the review that Martin Brummeler effectively perfectly captures the production values of early 90's indie rock and I was curious.

I've always thought the production sound of eras in important to the sound of the music. You could take Easy Mark and mix it in a different way, clean it up, change the guitar sounds a bit, and you'd have an entirely different song. It wouldn't feel like the early 90's any more. If you fiddled with it enough and put it through a four-track you could probably make it sound like the late 1960's, you know? So if this Brummeler guy actually made a new album that sounds like an old album, I want to hear it, just because.

Unfortunately for me at the time, Mass Solo Revolt was not available to download illegally anywhere on the internet. I looked high and low, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I gave up my hunt, not having any money for it, and just let it reside in the back of my head.

After about a month I was at a friend's house and his father had Napster open, the legal one, so I looked for bands that came to mind and one of the first that came up was Mass Solo Revolt. I did a search, pulled up Easy Mark, rocked out to the first minute and a half and then suddenly was horridly offended by Brummeler's vocals on it and all the other tracks. I moved on, feeling a little bummed that I spent so long being all hopeful for an album only to be disappointed.

It didn't get out of my mind, though. Days later I loaded it up again and listened to this whole song and I thought: you know what, this kind of rocks, I want to hear it in another setting. I still didn't have any money though.

One day I couldn't take it anymore and I made the huge mistake of buying it through iTunes, all covered in DRM, but I was immediately addicted to the album as a whole. I listened to it probably 10 times in one day by the third day I had it. I played it everywhere, I played almost nothing else. I probably played the whole album at least 25 times in the first two weeks I had it.

What is it about it? I'm not really sure. There's something about the guitar sound across the whole record that really appeals to me. It's also pretty well paced, with only one real 'slow' song followed by the one real 'arty intro' that lasts thirty seconds and brings us crashingly into Bed Maker. Nearly every song is upbeat and has a definite groove to it, and thankfully they're all full of hooks and memorable lines. (The album doesn't even end on a down note/slow song like most do, thanks to Hostage Taker, probably the most 'single worthy' song on the album, being followed up by 'bonus track' Rubber Knife which should make you want to bounce all over the place ridiculously, unless you have no soul.)

I left a comment on their page on Last.FM saying, "I'm the only person who listens to this!" because at the time, I was. I probably still am.

Someone then sent me a message on Last.FM from Brummeler's account (either it was Martin or Jim Frye) thanking me for listening and I ended up asking a few questions ("What's it like to have people review your stuff? Do people sometimes get it all wrong? Is it weird to have people like me listen to your music obsessively? Can you send me lyrics?") and ended up exchanging emails with Jim Frye (who plays bass on this album).

Jim's pretty rad: he sent me a copy of Mass Solo Revolt's first album, The Sap, with handmade and numbered packaging (#52!) that is pretty rad. He told me about a year ago that he was going to send me a shirt, because I wanted to buy one of the red ones, but then I didn't hear from him for months. I dropped him an email because I still wanted to buy a shirt even if he wasn't just going to send me one, and he said he hadn't forgotten. Months pass. I left a comment on a blog entry where they say they're going to be recording soon saying "yay! new material!" and Jim left a comment going "BRAD! I haven't forgotten about you!"

It's been months since then without any word, but it's no big deal, I just think it's funny. I don't normally like to have any sort of dialog with or meet bands I love, partly because I am skittish and I am so often disappointed by people that I'd rather just not risk ruining my perception of a group, but Jim (and I assume Martin) are cool ass people.

Due to my iTunes copy being covered in DRM and me not having a real CD copy (probably because I will never get to see them play live and can't buy it from their merch stand) I had to buy the song All Bark from AmazonMP3 in order to include it on my Best of 2008 playlist. Today I'm going to have to buy Easy Mark to include it here in playable form probably.

But that's OK: this album is so rad that I will slowly buy it twice. You should buy it twice, too.