You might know Failure better as the band that wrote the song The Nurse Who Loved Me which was later covered in a somewhat over-the-top way by A Perfect Circle. Interestingly enough, Troy Van Leeuwen, who played guitar during the time this album was released, was a member of A Perfect Circle during their first album, but left the band before the second album was completed and did not play on the cover of this song. Just kind of funny.
Failure are one of those bands that most people would probably never hear of if it wasn't for people like me who think that the grunge era was something to be celebrated and remembered. It's easy to point to Local H and say, hey, grunge is still kind of relevant (regardless of the fact that Local H are more hard rock than they are grunge), but that's because they're still kicking. Failure has been dead for almost 13 years now, and no one is talking about them. That's a shame because this is a damn fine album full of damn fine songs just like this one, and you should check it out.
I'll be going back to trying to cover an equal number of new and old songs, as I've been focusing a bit too heavily on new music that excites me. I'm getting a lot of traffic thanks to being on Hype Machine now, so I'm going to use this as inspiration to post more. As always, just enjoy it!
The most surprising thing about OK GO's new album isn't the new musical direction they take, but how good it is. I thought that treadmill song was fun and good and everything but the rest of their work sounds like the worst parts of Weezer crossed with most lackluster parts of Eve 6, so it's understandable why fans of the band are a little miffed about their new album sounding like The Flaming Lips crossed with Prince, which are two artists I'm actually pretty much completely unfamiliar with.
White Knuckles, one of the more upbeat and easily accessible tracks on the album, sounds to me kind of like Pavement trying to do a Passion Pit song. It's good, but it's weird how much like other bands it sounds. I guess that's part of OK GO's underlying problem, they always sound like they're trying to sound like something. They never really just sound like themselves, whatever that could be. The more popular album cut, This Too Shall Pass, comes about as close as the band could possibly come to not sounding like another band, but for all I know that's just because I'm not familiar with whatever band that song sounds like.
All in all, I like this album, and I spun it a good seven or eight times straight through. My first listen I felt kind of feh about it, but This Too Shall Pass kept me coming back. I'd say out of the whole album there's maybe three or four "keepers". YMMV.
Site News: After nearly 15 months in action, starting today if you subscribe to staires_!_ via RSS, you'll see links to download the MP3s I feature. Also, it looks like after my comments yesterday, I'm now on Hype Machine. Please don't sue me.
The best thing about Vadoinmessico is that they remind me of how amazing Gomez sounded back when they first came around and eventually won the Mercury Prize. At that time Gomez sounded like this was a band that had it all figured out: easy to listen tunes you'd relax to in a beach chair while some lovely tanned girl (not a woman, mind you) laid by your side and you sipped some fruity tropical drink and smoked a big fucking blunt full of some bomb kush. This was "get a little buzzed, a little high, and fuck lazily when you get back from the beach" music. Unfortunately Gomez never lived up to the promise of their first album, and instead gradually devolved into a band that made songs that sounded like they were trying way too hard to be friendly to American radio (to such an extent that their songs could be performed by Nickelback and not sound at all unusual).
Thankfully, London-based (with members from Mexico, Austria, and Italy) Vadoinmessico seems to pick up where Gomez failed horribly and mix it with a little bit of the typical indie-of-today flavor and give us a nice seven track EP full of lazy sunny-day driving music. In Spain wraps up the EP with arguably their best song so far, and you only really need to listen to it once to understand that this song is pretty damn good.
While you can buy the EP from Amazon by clicking on the album are above, I recommend you go to http://vadoinmessico.bandcamp.com/ and download it directly from the band themselves. You can even download it in FLAC from them, if you want, as well as a wide variety of other formats.
See, this is why you read staires_!_ because all those music blogs on Hype Machine don't know dick about shit. Or is that shit about dick? I don't know. Point is, I'm fucking awesome, and I've been doing this for well over a year now and no one gives a shit about me. That's the true badge of awesomeness, right there.
I'm unabashedly in love with Archie Bronson Outfit's Derdang Derdang. I posted two songs from it here and even included Dead Funny in my drifted away playlist. I knew, however, that their album before Derdang, Fur, was not very good. So I was worried: would their new album be good and live up to the unrealistically high expectations Derdang's purely consistent awesomeness set for me, or would it fail those expectations and just be merely OK, or worse, would it just suck really bad?
It's clear from the first thirty seconds of album opener Magnetic Warrior that this is not Derdang Derdang. It's basically a relentless assault on your ears, a dramatic opening statement meant to completely obliterate any thought you had that Coconut might have been Derdang Part Two. He's not singing about a woman, or at least I don't think he is, or anything at all really, probably. I'm not even sure what Magnetic Warrior is, you know?
Maybe that's part of the genius of the album, how almost indiscernible a lot of the lyrics are, with vocals buried under static and echo. Derdang was an album with a message (and that message was "love sucks balls but damn women are fun to play with") and Coconut isn't, at least as far as I can tell. This is a collection of songs, good songs that are fun to listen to, but is there meaning to it? Is there meaning to anything, ever?
I just read a review of this album that suggested there are strains of psychedelia in it, and maybe it's because I've saturated myself with so much psychedelia over the years or just because so much music I listen to has subtle strains of psychedelia in it, I just don't see it. If psychedelia means your music is echo-y, static-y, and "swirly" in some ways, then this song is clearly psychedelic, but that beat, that almost disco-like feel to it, what does that make it?
Is Coconut the first disco-psychedelia record? Are we witnessing the further evolution of music here? After years of same-y bullshit is it Archie Bronson Outfit who are bringing us the first clear example of what music in the 21st century became? Disco-punk-psychedelia?
I'm utterly gobsmacked by how good the new Ted Leo album is. Before this I didn't really listen to Ted Leo. I liked Me and Mia (I mean, who doesn't? Who couldn't?) but his albums left me feeling a little lukewarm. The Brutalist Bricks reverses this trend completely and I'm finding myself thinking about it a lot. This song, Bottled in Cork has been the first "song I'm addicted to" that I've had in a couple months, where every time I get in my car it's the song I specifically seek out to listen to because I like it that much.
There's a couple cool things about the album, one is that it doesn't start off with its strongest songs. Most albums blow their load in the first four tracks, putting the best song in the second place, but that's not the case with Brutalist Bricks. Heck, I'd say one of the weakest tracks on the album is track two. The album just gets stronger and stronger as it goes on, and past the halfway mark you're finally hit with some of the best songs on the album. It's surprising, and, dare I say, absolutely genius. Instead of petering out, this album ramps up, and by the time it ends you want more.
Ted Leo is playing at The Troubadour on Saturday. Despite not being a fan, I went and saw him play near the end of summer last year and he was fantastic. The guy lives and breathes music. He's like the pop-punk version of Bruce Springsteen, giving his all every show and never letting up. Ted Leo is something that needs to be witnessed, and I'll be at his show Saturday (Ted, if you're reading this, please get me, my girlfriend, and my fan of yours friend on some sort of list, just so we can be sure to get in, please!) rocking the fuck out!
Brent Knopf is one third of Menomena, a band I've unabashedly lavished praise on here and who I feverishly await a new album from, and this is his first solo album featuring a exhausting cast of Portland musician guest appearances. The album as a whole is beautiful, taking some of the more gorgeous parts of Menomena's sound and throwing them into a nearly ridiculously pensive direction.
That's my one misgiving about Intuit, the album is so pensive, almost claustrophobic in a way, that's just kind of hard for me to listen to. A couple tracks into it I already start to feel emotionally exhausted. There's no levity here, no light moments, just a fist that keeps clenching tighter and tighter the whole way through.
One of the other guys from Menomena, Danny Seim, has his own solo project Lackthereof (which I'll post a song from tomorrow) and it's great to listen to these two guys back to back because it's clear where they intersect in Menomena. Knopf brings the emotion to the music and Seim brings the playfulness in drum beats and vocals. There's a joy to hearing the artists of a great band work on their own, like McCartney and Lennon splitting apart finally, because it makes you appreciate the combination of them even more. There's nothing wrong with Ramona Falls, it is absolutely beautiful, but without Seim balancing out Knopf's foreboding feelings, it's almost too much for this listener to handle.
When I was 14 or 15 the internet girlfriend of Mark Sam Olynciw sent me some LSD tabs wrapped up in gum wrappers through the United States Postal Service. I didn't think they'd ever get to me, but they did.
This guy, Mark Olynciw, was the biggest douchebag I ever knew back then, and he and I had little flame wars between our websites---mine was ElectricBiscuit.com and his was Riothero.com. I considered him hugely pretentious, constantly trying to write about shit that sounded smart while I was just all about speaking my mind and trying to piss people off by doing it. I'd discover that he'd be stealing the things people said from other websites or from books and posting them on his blog---which was always more popular than mine at the time which pissed me off quite a bit---as if they were his own, so I'd call him out.
One of the best things he ever did was steal the entire design template from an MTV webpage about Radiohead---which was back when Radiohead was releasing Kid A and the hype around it was absolutely huge---and fiddle with it so it would be the design of his blog, except he didn't bother to give any credit to where he got it from, so I called him out, and then we got into another flame war and he'd go off about how it didn't matter.
Him and his stupid little internet girlfriend would call my house and pose as interviewers and ask me completely innocuous questions that I would answer honestly because I didn't give a crap, and then they'd start giggling like they were pulling a fast one on me by asking me about my TV watching habits and I would just be like, "Seriously? This is funny to you guys? Don't you realize you're just wasting YOUR time?" If this was happening to me these days I would say, "Come on, you're letting the terrorists win," but this was back before the word "terrorist" was in the forefront vernacular of every American.
It's been 11 years since those days but it's obvious that I forget absolutely nothing. What's even funnier is that if you look at the source of riothero.com right now he's still doing the same thing; he's commented out the credit for where he got the template from. He's not even using the website but he's still careful to make sure people don't know that he's not making the shit himself. Some things never change, Mark! Glad to see you're still a douche nozzle!
Anyway, I took two tabs of this really weak LSD that this girl sent me and it didn't do anything after an hour. I started talking to another online friend of mine, whose name I can't remember and whose website I can't remember and so I have to point out how isn't it funny that you remember your enemies better than you remember your friends, and he was like, "It's probably some weak shit, put two more under your tongue and let me know what happens," so I did, and an hour later nothing happened, so he told me to just put the last four or so under my tongue and let them fully dissolve and see what happens.
About half an hour later I WAS TRIPPING BALLS. My monitor started swirling around, and I could still type so I was like, "DUDE I AM TRIPPING BALLS!" so he told me to put on some music, and at the time I was listening to a lot of industrial dance music, which I realize now is an easy way to say "psuedo-wannabe-industrial shit that is completely neutered and mostly retarded", and I loved this song Orange Moon so I put it on and it became the soundtrack for my entire trip. I didn't want to put anything else on for fear of ruining the awesome feelings it was giving me, so I just put it on loop.
It played even when I crawled out of my bathroom window and laid in the grass outside my house staring up at the trees, which were swaying gently in the breeze, which was making the branches cast waves through the night sky, which was full of millions of stars, more stars than I had ever seen in my life, and they were all moving in and out of each other, like there were three different planes of stars and they were each undulating, moving in and out of each other. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen in my life.
Pretty much everything I saw that night was the most amazing thing I had seen in my life up til that point (I had yet to have sex or even see a naked woman in person, much less have one under me moaning with the pleasure I was inflicting upon her, so my point of reference at the time was relatively limited) and I crawled back in my window to grab my digital camera, and then started taking pictures of the amazing things I was seeing. At one point I climbed up onto a brick wall and precariously balanced on it while leaning over several feet and holding onto the roof just to snap a picture of some power lines---and now it occurs to me this is probably how people on acid seriously injure themselves.
The next day when I sobered up and looked at the pictures, I was disappointed to see that they were just pictures of grass, of tree bark really up close and entirely out of focus, and of the corner of the roof of my house. I still felt a little funny, though, like I was enlightened in some way, and I don't mean in the spiritual sense, but my body actually felt lighter, like some weight had been lifted off my shoulders, not a metaphorical burden, but an actual weight.
I only wish I had been older, and more capable of holding onto that feeling. My memories of my one LSD experience are distant now and I can hardly remember how I really felt at the time. It's as if the experience wasn't mine, but one that was told to me so many times by a friend that I've begun to be able to tell it myself in such a way that it feels in my head as if I was experiencing it myself.
I listen to Orange Moon now and I have no recollection of the way it made me feel, just the vague memory that it made me feel like I was full of pure joy. The angst and depression I was loaded with when I was 15 temporarily melted away and for a couple of hours I cared about nothing else in the world but how absolutely beautiful it all was, and afterward it didn't matter that it was all a hallucination, knowing that didn't diminish the experience at all.
You know what... anyone got any LSD they want to send me through the mail?
Australian 20 year old "Pogo" crafted an short EP of electronic tracks composed mostly solely out of samples from Alice in Wonderland. That's all you really need to know about this. First track "Alice" is the clear standout and I discovered it thanks to this amazing thing which uses Pogo's cool as shit YouTube video and stacks it and layers in such a way that if you are stoned, or even if you aren't stoned, you will trip balls on how absolutely incredible it is.
I'm going to link to that a few more times because you should really check it out because it is so awesome.
If you click on the album art above you can go to Last.FM, where you can download all four songs off the EP for free. This isn't awe-inspiring stuff, but it feels great and both Alice and this track Lost have worked their way into my regular rotation and they should be in yours too. Add a little whimsy to every day.
Back before my freshman year of high school a little independent film came out called The Blair Witch Project. I'd say most people hear the title of this movie and they groan, usually about how terrible it was, but before most people thought it was terrible, a lot of people thought it was amazing and absolutely ground breaking. I saw it the second day of limited release, back when people still thought it might be real due to the clever marketing campaign that just blatantly lied to people and said that it was found footage. I was probably the only person in the sold out theater who knew it wasn't real, but by the end of the movie I was scared shitless. I had just witnessed the most terrifying thing I'd ever seen in my life.
I think a lot of it was to do with the fact that my 14 year old mind had been heavily saturated with first person shooter games over the last four years, starting with Wolfenstein 3D for the SNES when I was 9, Doom for SNES when I was 10, Doom II for Windows 95 and Quake when I was 11 and so on. In short, I think my little brain was acclimated to seeing things in the first person perspective and being completely immersed in them, so when the final section of Blair Witch happened, and I was second to the front row so that the screen was the only thing I could see, and they started running through that house with the cameras as if they were their only eyes, it wasn't them in that house, it was me and what happened to them didn't happen to them, it happened to me.
I couldn't talk for a few hours after seeing it. When I got home I just laid down on my floor for a while. I couldn't even articulate in my head why I was so scared by it. It just moved me on some primal level, and I became an immediate fan.
I started up a website at BlairWoods.com and begun compiling all the information I could on the film. I hunted down interviews in magazines and newspapers, and slowly brought together all the information into one large dossier including how they found the actors, how much they paid them, what gear they used, how they used a pre-programmed GPS unit to move between checkpoints that the directors would stock with small amounts of food and secret notes for each actor on how they should behave. I still remember a lot of it: the actors were absolutely alone in the woods for days, by the end of the shoot they were living off an apple a day, seriously starving in order to make their performances more convincing, that they improvised certain things like when Mike threw the map away. A lot of this info is now on the wikipedia page for the movie.
The highlight of all this for me was that my website got mentioned in an article that was syndicated in newspapers around the country. I still have a copy of the Los Angeles Times with a reference to BlairWoods.com right on the front page of whatever section it was. Pretty cool for a 14 year old. The only downside was that I never had any sort of advertising on the website, this was back before Google got into the advertising business or was at all relevant. I remembered applying to be a part of UGO but they shot me down. Oh well.
This song was included on the faux-soundtrack for the movie called Josh's Blair Witch Mix which mostly sucked.
For the record, The Blair Witch Project is 5,000 times better than that Paranormal Activity bullshit with it's stupid generic horror movie The Ring-like bullshit ending.