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It's good to be off of work for a week. Along with all of the obvious reasons, it's finally allowed me some time to clean up and improve Drive Blind. So far, there aren't a lot of changes that just jump out at you, but believe me that I'm a lot more familiar with the code on this site now. The biggest improvement is that I've finally enabled comments and have consistant-looking individual archive pages for my posts. I also now have the individual and monthly archives enabled, as well as RSS and Atom feeds. So, go crazy, be the first to post a comment, although I'll be just as appreciative of the second and three hundredth. I feel pretty comfortable promising that there will be other improvements coming here soon, such as more photos and maybe some music downloads. Of course, if you have any suggestsions, I'd love to hear them.
Happy new year. I'll return to some more regular posts next week. Thanks for reading.
Now listening: White Stripes - Get Behind Me Satan
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It probably couldn't get much more cliched. I'm preparing to write my year-end best-of music lists while (finally) reading High Fidelity. This year's list didn't really surprise me too much, although it was harder to whittle down to ten than it has been the past couple of years. That's probably because I actually bought many more new releases this year than I did last year or the year before. Maybe that's because I spent some time DJing at WMFO, maybe I spent more time reading music blogs and websites, or maybe I just felt re-invigorated about new music after spending a few years catching up on all of the Talking Heads, The Smiths, and Elvis Costello that I'd missed out on the first time around. I have my list down to 12 albums, and by the time that I get to the end of the post I know that there can be only 10. I'll cheat, though, and put some "honorable mentions" at the bottom. Just in case the anticipation is killing you, neither Bloc Party nor Sufjan Stevens are on the list. Bloc Party came close, but the album has just taken too long for me to really get into, and I don't even own Illinois (yet). This is hard...drumroll, please.
Driveblind's Top 10 Albums of 2005
(in no particular order - this is difficult enough already)
Spoon - Gimme Fiction I hadn't paid too much attention to them before this album, even though I own Girls Can Tell. This one just makes me dance like a guitar album hasn't in a while. How can you help but not do a little Jagger swagger to "I Turn My Camera On"?
Feist - Let It Die This one is about half covers, but since I didn't recognize most of them they were new to me. This Broken Social Scenester just has a great voice, and I'm still holding out for "Mushaboom" to be 2006's #1 summer jam.
The Decemberists - Picaresque Just your typical album about sailors, army wives, and being swallowed by a whale. Plus, my new crush Petra Haden sings on it. I have to mention her here since her album with Bill Frisell just got cut from my list.
Tears - Here Come The Tears Anderson and Butler together again? It's absolutely everything I hoped that it would be. Forget everything that's happened since Dog Man Star; these two haven't missed a beat and are still perfect together. I do feel bad for whoever the other two blokes in the band are. That must be a pretty thankless job, except for the getting to be in a big rock band part.
Stars - Set Yourself on Fire This was the first 2005 album that I bought this year and I immediately knew that it was going to be on this list. I picked it up after hearing "Calendar Girl" on Alexandra's show on WZBC. I had really liked their first EP and album (the ones with the brilliant cover of "This Charming Man"), but they kinda fell off my radar after that. Welcome back.
Franz Ferdinand - You Could Have It So Much Better They were solidly at the top of last year's list. While a second album can never recapture the newness of a brilliant debut, this one showed that they weren't letting up at all and that you'd better keep dancing. And how about a piano ballad ("Eleanor Put Your Boots On") to show that they're not just a one-trick four-on-the-floor band?
Engineers - Engineers As with any really good shoegazey album, each song just flows into the next one. I can't name the titles of any songs on here, but it was one of my favorite things to sit down and listen to beginning-to-end this year.
Eels - Blinking Lights And Other Revelations Eels are the kind of band who should be making epic double albums. After being turned off by their past two albums, I was happy to see E get back to his melancholy roots. Despite the last couple, E is probably still one of the best songwriters of the past 10 years.
Doves - Some Cities This album sounds like Doves, which couldn't be a better thing. I don't think I ever pulled out this album to listen to any songs individually, but I always turned it up when "Black and White Town" came on. Awful cover, though.
Maria Taylor - 11:11 Azure Ray/Now It's Overhead girl puts out an album of folk, electronic, and beautiful voices. I don't know what to say about this one except I just liked how it sounded in my car. Thanks to Petrina at WZBC for playing this over and over again.
--
Honorable Mentions: Bloc Party - Silent Alarm, Editors - The Back Room, Sigur Ros - Takk, Art Brut - Bang Bang Rock and Roll
Best Single: Art Brut - "Emily Kane"
Best Show: Decemberists, Avalon (the one in May)
Most Welcome Comeback: Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler getting back together
Most Disappointing Album: Idlewild - Warnings/Promises
Albums that may have made the list had I listened to them more: Ladytron - Witching Hour, Tom Vek - We Have Sound, The Clientele - Strange Geometry
Finally, here are a few other lists I've found in the past couple of weeks.
The Morning News
Stylus Magazine
Chromewaves
Information Leafblower
Tiny Mix Tapes
Popmatters
Almostcool
and of course, Pitchfork
Jerad posted this in Music | Comments (0)
The long-awaited and long-worked on 5.1 channel remixed version of The Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin will finally be available at the end of January. In case you're not familiar with this album, this multi-channel remix is actually helping this record get back to its roots. The original concept of The Soft Bulletin was to try to make a more accessible (i.e. only one CD playing at a time) version of what the band had done with Zaireeka. In my opinion, this is exactly the album that needs to be released in a multi-channel format. They've already proven that they can do great surround mixes with the wonderfully cacophonous Zaireeka and their latest release, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots.
According to the tracklisting, it looks like they chose the UK version of album for this re-release. Strangely, there were two different versions of this album released with slightly different running orders and one or two songs on each that wasn't on the other. I never found a good explanation why this was done and I have never seen this happen with other albums. Sure, labels will slap a "bonus track" on the end of an album when it's released here so that everybody who already bought the British import will go out and pick it up again (riiiiight), but different songs and sequensing...I'm stumped. Fortunately, we don't lose any of the songs since "The Spiderbite Song" and "Buggin'" are tacked on to the end of the tracklisting. In case you're completely lost by now, I'll just paste the damn tracklistings for the two versions below (each with appropriate remixes after the album's real last track, "Sleeping On the Roof").
US Version
01. Race for the Prize (Mokran mix)
02. A Spoonful Weighs A Ton
03. The Spark That Bled
04. The Spiderbite Song
05. Buggin'
06. What Is The Light?
07. The Observer
08. Waitin' For Superman
09. Suddenly Everything Has Changed
10. The Gash
11. Feeling Yourself Disintegrate
12. Sleeping on the Roof
13. Race for the Prize
14. Superman (Mokran mix)
UK Version
01. Race for the Prize
02. A Spoonful Weighs A Ton
03. The Spark That Bled
04. Slow Motion
05. What Is The Light?
06. The Observer
07. Waitin' for a Superman
08. Suddenly Everything Has Changed
09. The Gash
10. Feeling Yourself Disintegrate Listen
11. Sleeping on the Roof
12. Race for the Prize (Mokran mix)
13. Superman (Mokran mix)
14. Buggin'
Thanks to Chromewaves and FL Official site for the info.
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WTF is this? At first I thought that it was an adware/phishing/bad stuff scam, but there aren't really any links to anything else. I guess the secret is probably in the scroll boxes at the bottom of each post. The boxes that are currently being blocked here at work.
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My group's band played at our office Holiday party last week. This was the most ambitious set we've taken on, if for no other reason than all but two of these are new songs for us. I lent my voice to two of them ("Take Me Out" and the encore "Burning Down The House") and guitared on a couple others. For the most part, I was hanging around on the low end with my trusty Fender J-Bass. Come to think of it, there are worse nicknames that I could give myself. The set was pretty varied, as you can see:
Where the Streets Have No Name (U2)
One way or another (Blondie)
Blinded by the light (Manfred Mann)
Take Me Out (Franz Ferdinand)
Careless Whisper (George Michael)
One Headlight (Wallflowers)
Mustang Sally (Commitments)
The Wanderer (Dion)
Runaround Sue (Dion)
Roxanne (Police)
Birthday (The Beatles)
The One I Love (R.E.M.)
Livin On A Prayer (Bon Jovi)
Soul Man (Blues Brothers)
Love Shack (B-52s)
Burning Down The House (Talking Heads)
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Before you make your next customer service call, check out this site so that you can (hopefully) easily bypass the automated system and get straight to a real person. This was very useful today when I had to call FedEx three times to figure out why they didn't seem to want to deliver a package to me. On a related note, Gawker Media has a new site in it's big happy family. The Consumerist is fighting back against the joke that customer service has become. Even if it doesn't solve many problems, sometimes it's good to read about kindred experiences.
Now playing: Editors - The Back Room
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Spoon's Britt Daniels is going to be performing on one of my new favorite TV shows, Veronica Mars. In the show, Veronica frequently hangs out at a local karaoke bar, where indie rock stars occassionally stop in. For this episode, Britt will be playing Elvis Costello's "Veronica," of course. You'll probably see a little more about Spoon on this site once I get my list done. Gimme Fiction is a no-brainer for the top 10.
A lot has been made about this show filling the void left after Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the air. I'm glad to see that the producers of Veronica seem to be fully embracing those connections by having guest appearances by both Joss Wheadon and Alyson Hannigan this season, as well as Charisma Carpenter being a regular on the show. In some ways, things look almost too copied - replacing The Bronze with a karaoke bar, for example - but it still works. If you haven't see the show, it's in it 2nd season on UPN. I'd be watching a few episodes this week if my DVR hadn't crapped out.
Now playing: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Howl
Jerad posted this in Music | Comments (0)
It's time for that holiday music tradition - here come the year-end music best-of lists. It's always been fun to see what's on everybody's lists, but now that everybody has their own blog (umm, like me) it's time for a real flood of lists and complaning about others' lists and lists on the best lists... I'll link to some of the good ones that I find over the next couple of weeks and my own should show up here before too long. First, here's Roddy Woombly of Idlewild's top 10 list, c/o Filter mag. He pretty much had to put Sons and Daughters at the top of the list since he's dating one of the girls in the band. Did she put Warnings/Promises at the top of hers? I hope not. It's good, but Roddy, you guys can do better now that you're freed from the chains of the big bad major label.
Jerad posted this in Music | Comments (0)
I hate receiving phone calls where the first thing that I hear when I pick up is the clatter of someone picking up the receiver off of speakerphone. When I say "Hello, this is Driveblind," I would like to hear a nice "Hello" in reply, and not the sound of rattling and shuffling plastic. The upside is that the time that it takes them to take the receiver from the base to their ear gives me just enough time to hang up on them, if I'm feeling like that kind of guy that day.
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It was a good weekend for shows around here. On Saturday night I went back to the Lizard Lounge to see A Northern Chorus play. What a great place to see a show. It feels like someone just threw down some Persian rugs, turned on the red lamps, set up a bar in the corner, put a PA system in a basement, and invited all of their friends. Well, that's not too far off. If you haven't seen a show, any show, at the Lizard Lounge, you need to get yourself there, soon. I got much more into Charlene's set than I did last time that I saw them, fortunately. They can really get a good dreamy goove going. I chatted with their dummer, Brad, whose blog I've been reading for years, after the show, which leads me to Sunday night...
Last night I headed to the Paradise Lounge for the first time. Unfortunately, not many people followed me to see Mark Gardener (if you don't know, his old band wrote this blog's eponymous song). There were almost as many band members in the crowd as there were paying customers. Even though he's been able to get quite a crowd out the past few times that he's played Boston over the last couple of years, it seems that the Dinosaur Jr. show at the Middle East won out with the indie crowd last night. Of course this makes the show seem that much more intimate for us sitting at the tables behind Mark eating his pizza and drinking his wine before the show, but of course I wish that more people had come out to see him. It's their loss; the show was great. The other bands playing, Hopewell and Goldrush (doubling as Mark's backing band), played great sets to open things up before Mark played a good mix of stuff from his new solo record and four Ride classics.
Mark opened up with the first track on These Beautiful Ghosts, "Snow In Mexico." My very first impression of the song was that the lead guitar really reminds me of "From Time To Time" (on Carnival of Light). Of course, I loved hearing "Taste" and "Dreams Burn Down," but damn, the new stuff is good. The full-band treatment with Goldrush at times points the songs in a Ride-esqe direction without sounding too much like they're just trying for the obvious easy sound. With the wall of guitars on stage, though, it would be hard not to get a big sound like that. At almost all times someone was playing the 6 and 12-string acoustic guitar, with others on the 6 and 12-string electrics.
The connection between the two nights, other than the really good music, was seeing Randy and Brad from Charlene at the Paradise Lounge show on Sunday. Randy let me know that they're at work on a new album so they won't be playing live much soon, but I'll certainly be there the next time they get out. As Brad mentions in his blog, he saw Mark with that other band about a dozen years ago in the Paradise's main room. As he told me that I remembered having a conversation about Ride on stage there before some show (Supergrass? Coral? Super Furry Animals?) a couple of years ago. Was it Brad? Probably was, if I really think hard about it. For those of you who ditched Mark to see Dinosaur Jr, Brad has been so kind to put a recording of the show on his site. It'll be there for a few week, so enjoy. You shoulda been there, though.
Now Playing: Mark Gardener - These Beautiful Ghosts (natch)
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Yes, that's a picture of a bedroom covered in half-filled-with-water Subway cups. The cups on the bed spell out "Eat Fresh." I'm just glad that I don't live in the same town as this friend anymore. It makes his retribution that much more difficult.
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For a long time I've thought that it would be a little amusing to make a contribution to WBUR under the name Ulysses Robert Listeners. That way, when they say that this show has been made possible by U.R. Listeners, I'd know that they're talking about me. I said it was just a little amusing.
Jerad posted this in Thinking | Comments (0)
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