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Be wary of anyone who carries a sword around "just in case."
Jerad posted this in Weird | Comments (1)
The British Accents show on WMFO has moved time slots again this semester. After being left off of the initial schedule, a 1 hour (half what it used to be) time slot has been carved out for it on Sunday nights from 6-7pm. I guess this means that the music played during this shortened time will have to be twice as good. As always, I'll keep you updated as to when I might be on the air again. With my busy past month or two, I've had to pass on it the last couple of times a sub spot was offered to me.
Linked above is the new British Accents blog. This was set up after some problems with the weekly mailing list. Get your weekly news and concert listings there. For now, you can check out tonight's playlist at Spinitron.
Jerad posted this in Radio | Comments (0)
While requesting a quote for condo insurance this week, I was asked if we had any pets. I replied that, yes, we have two cats. His next question, which caught me a bit off-guard, was "Are they standard housecats?" As opposed to a mountain lion? Leopard? I think that anyone who's met our cats would agree that they're anything but standard, however I thought that it was in my best interest to just say "yes" and move on to the next question.
This is a picture of Simon attempting to eat some lettuce. He must've skipped the carnivore lesson in cat kindergarten.
Jerad posted this in Nuttin Much | Comments (0)
Last Thursday (9/14/06) I went to the basement of a dorm at Tufts University to see Asobi Seksu play a too-short set. They were only supposed to play for about 50 minutes to begin with, but they got caught in traffic between Brooklyn and here, so they ended up playing for only about a half hour. It was a good reverb-drenched shoegaze set, though, so I wasn't complaining too much. Almost as unfortunate as the short set was the inability of anyone not in the front row to see the band - that's what happens when there's no stage and the singer is under 5'. That also means that I wasn't able to get any pictures of the band. Oh well.
Despite these problems, there's still some very good news that came out of this. I got to "test" a new minidisc recorder at the show, so I ended up with recordings of their whole set. I haven't done any post-production, so the sound is a bit rough (the highs could be turned down), but generally I think it sounds pretty good. All of the songs here are from their great new album Citrus. You can sample some album cuts on their jukebox if you need somehing more than these live recordings. Then go ahead and buy it.
1. intro
2. New Years
3. Strawberries
4. Pink Cloud Tracing Paper
5. Strings
6. Nefi+Girly
7. Red Sea
8. thanks
I'll see how long my bandwidth holds up for these files...I'm looking into ideas for moving the files off the Driveblind domain. (Go EZArchive!) Of course, if anyone has any objections to these files being posted, I'll take them down. If you ask nicely.
I have some more exclusive live recordings that I hope to be putting up here soon, now that I have access to the right equipment. I hope the suspense isn't too painful.
Jerad posted this in Live | Comments (1)
R.E.M.'s second IRS-years compilation, And I Feel Fine, was released this week. I already had most of the stuff on the bonus disc, but a lot of it is buried on tapes that are still sitting in my closet somewhere. One gem that I re-discovered is the live version of "Life and How to Live It" that's on disc 2. Michael prefaces the song with a story about a guy who has divided his house into two halves. He lives on one side until he gets bored with it, and then goes to the other half with new clothes, furniture, and everything else. When he dies they find boxes and boxes of unread, unsold books that he'd written in the back of his closet. The book was called Life and How to Live It. I've never discovered whether this is a true story, a Southern fable, or just some made-up inspiration for the song. I had this same recording on my very first R.E.M. "rarities" compilation tape that I made in high school. I probably got most of the stuff from WSYC's end-of-semester All-Star Weekend when each DJ would play two hours of whatever band they wanted. Listening to this again reminded me of my years in high school and into the beginning of college where I would search out and buy anything remotely related to R.E.M. - Hindu Love Gods, Indigo Girls, LOTS of live tape trading, and eventually downloading RealAudio files. Early on in college I think I was able to claim that I owned everything (live stuff excluded) that R.E.M. had ever put to tape and released. As an 18-year-old, pre-Napster, I thought this was a pretty big deal.
After that initial rush of R.E.M. overload, I discovered new bands (many through R.E.M. interviews) and didn't listen to it as much any more, although I still know all of the records back-to-front and they're still some of my favorites. Over the past couple of years, though, the band has started to play some of their great early songs again. Some of them, like "Pilgrimage," I'm rediscovering as old favorites, and others I knew but had never really loved the first time around. The best example of this is definintely "Life and How to Live It." The album version of this only carries about 10% of the punch that the live version does, and it's become one of my very favorite early R.E.M. songs. It was the highlight of the show when I saw them at the Tweeter Center in 2003.
Incedentally, it was at this show that I first (briefly) met my fiancee. She doesn't remember me there, but that's just as well because her memories would probably just be of me blabbering on and on about what an incredible show this was and can't you believe that they played songs from Fables and Reckoning and so on.
FYI, even if you buy And I Feel Fine (and you should), hold on to your copy of Eponymous because I believe it's still the only place you can hear "Romance" on CD. Not that it's a great song, but, you know, I wouldn't want you to let a completist like me down.
Jerad posted this in Albums | Comments (0)
This weekend, I found some high school-era classics on YouTube. The first is of Nathaniel Hornblower protesting one of R.E.M.'s awards for "Everybody Hurts" at the '94 VMAs. I remember watching this live, and like most people, being left with an overwhelming feeling of "WTF?" It made a whole lot more sense when I found out that it was one of the Beastie Boys. I'm not sure how I found that out back then in the pre-internet dark ages.
This next video was introduced to me by my friend and future best man. He innocently recorded a Weezer performance off of Letterman one evening. I'm sure that he had no idea that the bassist, Matt Sharp, would steal the show bouncing around the stage in his John Denver t-shirt. The stillness of the rest of the band just amplifies his craziness. Unfortunately, after all of this build-up, it looks like this video has disappeared from YouTube. Damn you copyright infringement!
Jerad posted this in Nuttin Much | Comments (0)
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