I'm seeing Andrew Jackson Jihad tonight at The Troubadour. I used to hate the Troubadour, as I saw a couple bands there that sounded awful. I saw The National open for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which, at the time and especially in retrospect, seems ridiculous now.

I never talked about this album back in '09 because I suck ass. I've written previously about six different songs and then a seventh, on Christmas. This album is a bit different from Andrew Jackson Jihad's prior works: they go electric, and there's violins and actual production quality on it.

However the lyrics are sometimes not as good. Occasionally it sounds like they're trying too hard to sound like Andrew Jackson Jihad lyrics, and fall a little short in that extreme effort. It's still a good album, with good songs, but sometimes the lyrics get silly. This is starting to feel like a middle school book report. Then this. And this. Then this. Also this. This too. I feel like this about it.

If you live in Los Angeles and you're reading this, come see Andrew Jackson Jihad tonight. I haven't seen them live before but I can only imagine that they'll be bad ass. I also wonder what the crowd of people who call themselves Andrew Jackson Jihad fans look like. I'm usually curious about this sort of thing, but a Tuesday night concert can only bring out die hard fans or people who are generally unemployed and professionally drunk.

But this Los Angeles, and I am an Andrew Jackson Jihad fan, so maybe all their fans look just like me. Which is to say that The Troubadour is going to be full of hipsters like it always is. I'm rambling.

This song rocks.

Two years ago today I launched this domain as a music blog where I'd post a song every weekday for a year straight. I didn't make it to a song a day for a year, but it is somewhat surprising to me that I'm still doing anything at all with it today.

Sure, there's been a bit of a dry spell these last two or three months, but this tends to happen every winter. The music business dies off a bit in the cold months: people aren't touring (and those who are pretty much suck) and new albums aren't really coming out lest they miss year end lists (and the albums that do come out pretty much suck), so I'm just full of good excuses as to why I don't tend to update.

Like I said in my last post, I'm not particularly happy with the direction I've taken the site in the last year. I have been over-enthusiastic over bands that deserved, at most, to be damned with faint praise (something I'll delicately cover in my Best of 2010 post), and dismissive of bands that didn't immediately satiate my most pompous of desires. I'm not even really satisfied with the "re-design" that you see before you now---good ideas I wasn't willing to let go of when I saw they weren't functionally feasible. (And then there's the whole "sometimes the site freezes Chrome solid and crashes" problem.)

I have, in some ways, let myself down.

So here's to the third year being a better year. Thanks for reading, subscribing, whatever and ever amen.

Hi everyone. I am still alive and this site is still functioning.

I have hit a period of disheartening. I've also seemingly realized that a lot of the music I like is total shit.

I'll be working on my Best of 2010 and slowly rolling it out over the next weeks, and it'll include music I've featured already this year and a couple things I haven't written about individually.

The website might change in scope for 2011, I am not sure yet. Originally this site was meant to be a place where I could write about personal stories relating to what the music I like is about, but after the first year it seems like I ran out of stories, and worse than that, it seems like most of the music I listen to and cover these days isn't actually about anything, and it's kind of pissing me off.

So much songwriting these days seems to be made out of laziness. I don't want rant too much here because I am still thinking about it, but I am starting to understand what people like Elton John mean when they say "most modern music is rubbish these days". They're not just talking about popular music. They're also talking about indie music.

Stuff like The Dirty Projectors is technically interesting and even emotional, well constructed, but the actual songwriting is rubbish. They write songs about having people move in with them places, or silly female empowerment anthems, and sing them in ways that makes the songs sound interesting and powerful but the actual conceit behind the song has the depth of a puddle.

A good song should be structured like a story. (Weezer's Pinkerton has several songs that are properly structured this way, to cite a popular example.) The first verse should set up the basics and/or create a problem describing what the gist of the situation is. The chorus can be the generic emotional peak, or the central conceit of the song. The second verse should either elaborate or change the situation, there should be a progression of sorts, and each verse that follows should further that story.

Too many people don't give a shit and just sing nonsense that structurally means nothing but out of context sounds like it could be emotionally powerful. Michael Penn, one of my favorite singer-songwriters, is incredibly guilty of this. He writes, by and large, poetic nonsense. Individual lines sound good, but the whole of the song is completely meaningless and there is no actual movement or meaning to it.

So from now on, I think I might end up being a lot harder on the music I talk about here.

I'll also be diving more into my own musical pursuits since I am slowly learning guitar and starting to record things on my iPad. If you're interested in what I have been doing, check out username amiantos on SoundCloud. In the descriptions I try to map out what I was doing, what went wrong, what I'm happy about, and what I used to do it. Hopefully by tracking my own experiences in trying to make music in this high technology DIY era we're in, it'll help you in your own pursuits and help you analyze the things you like about the music you like.

Anyway, it's clear that my friends are electric---as in my iPad, my guitar, and this website. Thanks Gary Numan.

See you all soon.