Lost In GroVont

The Physics Of Meaning

A recent obsession with violins and cellos has led me to the music of The Physics Of Meaning.

After adding the band as a friend on MySpace, I got a message from Daniel Hart telling me that he spent some of his childhood in Emporia, Kansas, which was the nearest college town to where I went to high school.

Emporia is home to a meat packing plant and the 18+ bars my friends and I would  visit my senior year of high school. Daniel wrote a song about the town, "small towns and invisible people", which you can download from their website. I'm amazed that anyone could write such  a beautiful song about a place that smells like meat.

You can also listen to three other songs from the self-titled album on their website and MySpace page. I highly recommend "Manhattan is an island" which combines a multi-layered drum machine beat with a string arrangement that is unlike anything I've heard recently.

The amount of reading I've been doing lately has greatly increased in relation to the decrease in my working hours. I'm sure it also has something to do with the fact that I've been reading mass market paperbacks. Such easy reading of cookie-cutter tales by mediocre writers. (Alas, I aspire to be a mediocre writer with straight to paperback novels but nevermind that.)

After finishing Crichton's State of Fear, I craved more science in my fiction. A new television show I've enjoyed this year, Bones, is based on the novels written by an actual forensic anthropologist, Kathy Reichs, so I picked up Grave Secrets at a used bookstore. In the television show, the title character, Bones, works with a team of quirky smarties and an FBI agent to solve crimes based on what little remains of the corpse--usually just bones. The books are less restricted in that the central characters travel all over the world identifying human remains; however, the characters remain two-dimensional on the page. Even the stereotypical nerds on the tv show are presented with more depth than their counterparts in the books. Although I cringe at Reichs' writing every other page, the forensic mysteries are interesting, and I will probably work my way through the books quickly especially with the frequent rain keeping me inside for most of the day.

Neptune Karaoke

On Beverly Hills, 90210, we were given the Peach Pit After Dark. On Buffy, it was the Bronze. (What is the name of the place Seth "works" on The O.C.?) Veronica Mars is giving us coffeehouse karaoke. Courtney Taylor-Taylor, from the Dandy Warhols, grabbed the mic in the third episode this season, "Cheatty Cheatty Bang Bang", and it is being officially reported that Spoon's Britt Daniel is going to be making an appearance on my favorite television show.

What kind of stunt musical guest casting is this? Spoon is one of my favorite bands and I love Britt Daniel's voice, but what purpose is he going to serve on Veronica Mars? Taylor-Taylor's rendition of "Love Hurts" was horrible and it disrupted the flow of the episode's story. Is a 30 second appearance by Britt going to bring the legions of Spoon fans (only 10 of which own tvs) to Neptune? I doubt it.

The New Pornographers are going to be opening for Belle & Sebastian on their North America tour? Where are they going to fit everyone? That is going to be a long caravan. No word yet on where they are playing in the Bay Area.

Pre-orders are available for all three formats of the first single off of Belle & Sebastian's The Life Pursuit. Why three formats for Funny Little Frog? I do not know. However, the band realizes the ridiculousness of it all and is offering a reasonable rate for all three with bonus tracks and videos and such. Offer only available overseas so be warned of higher shipping costs.

 

Margot & the Nuclear So & So's

The Dust Of Retreat arrived in my mailbox yesterday, and I've listened to it in its entirety (including the marching band drum solo) at least a dozen times. Sometimes emo. Sometimes rock. Margot & the Nuclear So & So's are a brilliant pop ensemble.

The lyrics are omnifarious. The music is packed with sound--the aforementioned drums, jazz trumpets, cellos, piano...

Occasionally, the acoustic guitar takes over, as in "Jen Is Bringing The Drugs", and we are treated to a folk song.

Or a round of meows!

A sea chanty of sorts.

On a freezing Chicago street.

Dress me like a clown.

RIYL: Okkervil River. Chin Up Chin Up. Colin Meloy.

The mp3s are of lower quality than those on the album and are provided as a sample of the music on The Dust Of Retreat. Please buy the record! It's only $9 and you'll love it!

The start of something

Again it starts raining at one o'clock in the afternoon. Two things in my tiny environment to set my clock by: the rain starts at 1PM and the light in the parking lot outside my apartment goes off at 2:15AM.

Something else I can count on: When Voxtrot's "Raised By Wolves" plays on my stereo, I think, "What Belle & Sebastian song is this?"

Ramesh's recent weblog post details the evolution of Voxtrot including the influences of Belle & Sebastian and The Smiths, so it's okay if I describe Voxtrot as "Belle & Sebastian with a little less twee."

If you haven't heard about the group from Austin, Texas, you will. The next ep, Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives, isn't scheduled to be released until the spring. They don't even have a full-length on the horizon yet.

Now, you can check out tracks on their MySpace page and download "The Start of Something" from their website.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, here is "Raised By Wolves" from Voxtrot's current s/t ep you can order from here.

And to compare: Belle & Sebastian's "Expectations".

Without signing on the dotted line.

Kristin Hersh, formerly of Throwing Muses, has been writing frequently in her blog about the trials of a being a career musician without the support of a large record label. Her current band, 50FootWave is offering up their latest recording as a free download. Aptly titled, Free Music, the ep includes 5 tracks from an October recording session.

From 19 September 2005, Kristin writes:

...after many years as a signed artist, with large advances at my disposal, way more people heard of my band without ever hearing the actual music. That band is dead now. My new band is finding it harder and harder to find the small audience we require to sustain ourselves. I find it hard to care about file-sharing when all I ever really wanted was for people to hear, not buy my music.

Even if you aren't a Throwing Muses/Kristin Hersh/50FootWave fan, if you are a music fan you should reading Kristen's blog. She writes unabashedly and intelligently about music, family, and the relationship of the two.

And while you are at download Free Music!

Recorded in Italy for the drunk and the elderly.

The anti-C.S. Lewis? Phillip Pullman has written fantasy worlds for children, but his characters explore human existence without the need of religious symbolism. The New Yorker on-line has a great article on Pullman.

Although I have yet to read the His Dark Materials trilogy, Pullman's books have been recommended to me before. After reading the article, I'm even more intrigued.

Need to be inspired?

Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Yuri Ono designs and manages the web site.

Participants accept an assignment, complete it by following the simple but specific instructions, send in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and see their work posted on-line. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments is intended to guide people towards their own experience.

Some of the assignments I want to tackle:

• 27. Take a picture of the sun.
• 45. Reread your favorite book from fifth grade.
• 51. Describe what to do with your body when you die.
• 52. Give advice to yourself in the past.

In an attempt to drown out the horrible sounds coming from a boombox that was bleeding into my studio this afternoon, I listened to the Devics Ribbons ep at a high volume. Full of dense instrumentation by Dustin O'Halloran and the haunting vocals of Sara Lov (think Beth Gibbons), I'm left longing for the new full length cd scheduled for release early next year.

Don't Take It Away mp3 (5816.0K)

Keep Running mp3 (4516.2K)

If the question has no answer is it a question?

One of the few (few) things I miss about the Midwest is thunder and lightning. After this weekend in San Francisco, I think I'll be able to go another year without witnessing a storm as strong as the one I'm currently watching outside my windows. If my lightning math is still good, the strikes are more than 5 miles away with distance increasing rapidly.

A great way to spend a stormy weekend is reading. After the initial lull of the first fifty pages, Micheal Crichton's State of Fear has hooked me in. It's all about global warming. Global warming can be intriguing and suspenseful! I'm a little surprised.

In local music news, Finest Dearest is a San Francisco band who just happens to be playing down the street from me at the Elbo Room tomorrow night. Pretty keyboard tinkling and cello make the sound a little dreary (great for the current weather) but Finest Dearest are indie pop reminiscent of That Dog or a female fronted K Records band. Visit their MySpace page for two tracks from the Pacemaker EP and two demo songs. I highly recommend "Idaho".

Lab Partners

In my high school physics lab, we made holograms, played with magnets, and occasionally set things on fire with the chemistry Bunsen burners. I didn't learn anything, and my grades in physics lab at university proved it. The new album from Lab Partners, Wicked Branches, would have been a nice soundtrack[1] to our goofing off though.

Lab Partners are a four piece from Dayton, Ohio and produce brilliant space rock. Recently, they signed to Reverb Records and you can head over to the Reverb site to download two tracks from the album.

First heard on the WOXY.com Lounge Acts Podcast, I enjoyed Lab Partners' songs so much I converted the podcast into individual tracks. I highly recommend the first three songs.

WOXY.com Lounge Acts Podcast from 02 December 2005

01  Intro
02  Sold Your Soul
03  Blood Moon
04  Snow Cover Leaves
05  Interview
06  Love Don't Care
07 Sensations
08  It's How You Feel
09  Outro

And if anyone recognizes the songs without titles, please let me know in the comments. [update: discovered WOXY archives their playlists so I was able to fill in the blanks]

[1] My high school physics teacher was more of a classic rock fan with CCR and Eagles being our warm up music until the bell rang.

i'm not sick but i'm not well

Do you remember 1998 when Harvey Danger released a song called "Flagpole sitta"? The song was ambiguous. What is a flagpole sitter? But it was catchy and unavoidable if you listened to the radio. (iPods did not exist seven years ago.)

Maybe you are more familiar with the career of Harvey Danger, but I only recently realized they had released a couple more albums and were signed to Kill Rock Stars. More importantly, I found out they released their album Little By Little... as a free download on their website. A noble act, maybe. The band explains the reason behind the free download in a press release:

...it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign, along with radio and press promotion, live shows, and videos.

They go on to explain the band would rather everyone hear the album than make money from album sales. Okay.

Although I enjoyed "Flagpole sitta" when I was 18, I had no further interest in Harvey Danger's sound. My opinion of Little By Little...: Blah. If it wasn't for the free download, I wouldn't have heard it at all, so I guess the band accomplished it's more noble goal.

I'll admit it. I download music regularly. Most of the songs are available legally via the band's website, myspace page, or label site. Occasionally, my downloading practices are not on the up and up though. The albums I download illegally are usually not cds I would purchase anyway. When I buy vinyl, I also download the tracks since I can't carry my turntable in my messenger bag. I don't feel guilty about downloading.

The optimist in me thinks the availability of music on the internet exposes more people to better music. I'd like to think my teenage listening habits would be less embarrassing if I had access to the music the way we access it now. The debate will continue until technology makes it irrelevant again.

"Do they make wooden Christmas trees anymore?"

How many times have you seen A Charlie Brown Christmas? Take this quiz to find out how much you remember.

"I've been kissed by a dog!" screams Lucy. "I have dog germs! Get hot water, get some disinfectant, get some iodine!"

The mp3 blogs are raving about The Light Footwork album One State Two State. I've had the disc for over a month and love it.

Look at Absinthe's film Pop for the awesome snowboarding footage I was missing in First Descent.

Independent Arab news source Al Jazeera staffers are blogging.

So Much Silence is converting streams of live radio broadcasts from some the best indie bands into easy to handle mp3s.

Pitchfork interviews Wolf Parade.

Pitchfork: Speaking of literature-- you mention the Marquis de Sade on your New Music Canada page. Was that tongue in cheek? Or does de Sade somehow fit into your game plan?

Arlen: [Laughs] I wrote that years ago, but I can't remember what I was going for...Yeah. I don't know that the Marquis de Sade's writing has place in Wolf Parade, really. I don't remember why.

A lot of our shows were still weird art openings and stuff like that where we'd just get paid in liquor. Where it would be, "Hey, we can't pay you, but you can drink as much liquor as you want..." So, a few of our shows were pretty ridiculous.

Pitchfork: It was your own private 120 Days of Sodom.

Arlen: Yeah, we felt like we were just a bunch of Huns raiding people's liquor cabinets.

No best of the year lists here.

A list of five songs I recently downloaded that have been played more than once.

1. Saint Jude's Infirmary -- "The Church of John Coltrane" from the album Happy Healthy Lucky Month to be released in January 2006. (If Hope Sandoval and Stuart David started playing music together?)

2. Maria Taylor -- "Song Beneath the Song" from 11:11. Of note, I never liked Azure Ray or the solo projects of the two song writers, but I do like this one song which I first heard (embarrassingly enough) on an episode of One Tree Hill.

3. Kelley Stoltz -- "Prank Calls" from the upcoming release Below the Branches. I heard Mr. Stoltz dj before a show not to long ago (Fiery Furnaces at Cafe du Nord, maybe?) and this track fits into the sounds he was playing that night.

4. The Februarys -- "All The Time In The World" 

5. Parks & Recreation -- "La La La La La"

The saddest book you've ever read

Please don't judge the quality of Just A Modern Rock Story by the long period of time it took me to read it.

I wanted to read the book because I love Dear Catastrophe Waitress and I love to read. I knew very little about Belle & Sebastian before picking up Paul Whitelaw's biography of the band up to 2004. Now I know too much?

"I didn't want to be singing about school when I was thirty," [Isobel] says waspishly. She thought it was curios that Stuart [Murdoch] should write so much about school? "I though it was a bit disturbing, yeah." To be fair, it's not more disturbing than Isobel actually dressing as a schoolgirl.

A quote from Isobel Campbell followed by a backlash from Whitelaw was a common trend throughout the book.

There is undoubtedly something slightly voyeuristic, almost obsessive, about Stuart's fascination with characters like this, but he writes about them so beautifully, and with such genuine empathy, he succeeds where other writers might sound exploitative.

Whitelaw comes across as a devoted, long-time fan of Belle & Sebastian. However, other than his apparent dislike of Isobel, his writing is honest when an album (Fold Your Hands Child, Walk Like A Peasant) fails to live up to the band's potential.

The book also includes an invaluable resource for Belle & Sebastian fans with an appendix of all official releases, covers, etc. and liner notes.

Bright lights in the sky.

Unable to sit and watch the news, I was reading at the same time.  However, this story about a meteor falling through the atmosphere being filmed by casual observers in Australia caught my attention. (The space nerd in me was very excited.)

Everyone is reporting different sizes of the meteoroid. I heard "half the size of a small car" and "the size of a soda can" and the linked article says that it was the size of a basketball. Obviously, there is no accurate way to measure the size of something based on the light it outputs (just thinking about the different variables in the equation is giving me a headache) but the range of the estimates is fairly extreme.

In local news, the Bay Bridge was shut down twice today due to a suspicious package spotted near Treasure Island.

Jinx put Max in space. Jinx must get Max back.

First Descent is not your typical ski porn[1]. First Descent tries to have heart. Unfortunately, I went to see the documentary for the awesome snowboarding footage and was, in turn, disappointed. I think the film makers need to re-think who their key audience is. Can you imagine anyone shelling out $10 to see a snowboarding documentary who wasn't in it for the awesome snowboarding footage? (Even the three teenage boys in the front row left the theatre after 30 minutes.)

First Descent divides the evolution of snowboarding into three parts and inter-cuts them into the story of three generations of active snowboarders hanging out in Alaska. We're supposed to care about these five snowboarders. We meet their mothers, hear about how much they are admired by their contemporaries, and are told again and again how devoted each one of them is to their sport.

I like snowboarding. I like strapping on my board and looking down the face of a mountain (a very small mountain). I like watching snowboarding. But I didn't give a shit about these five people in Alaska or these five people in their childhood homes or these five people roasting marshmallows. I didn't care that the youngsters looked up to the aging vets. I didn't care about Farmer's struggles with getting older. I wanted to see them zooming down the side of a mountain. (And they are beautiful mountains.)

So the film fails on two counts. It wanted me to care about the snowboarders but was unable to do so. And for a snowboarding film, it was lacking in awesome snowboarding footage.

Maybe I wouldn't be so bothered by the failure of First Descent if the brilliant documentary, Dogtown and Z-Boys, hadn't been released four years earlier.

The frequency of my movie going has increased lately as I try to use up a gift certificate. And since I feel cheated if I don't get two movies out of one ticket, I also saw Walk The Line. It's a glossy bio-pic of Johnny Cash which does exactly what it is meant to do: portray a music legend as a damaged kid who overcomes his struggles in order to achieve love and fame. The love story is tear-worthy but not too cheesy. The music is great. And the filmmakers have a lot of things going for them out of the starting gate, so it would tragic if the film sucked.

It has been a long time since I've seen a really great movie in the theatre. I'm hoping Brokeback Mountain and The Family Stone won't disappoint.

[1] Awesome snowboarding footage! With a hip-hop soundtrack! 

Saturday Night Top Five

1. Veronica Mars

2. College-ruled composition books

3. Teenbeat records

4. SFist

5. After the rain stops leaving the streets cleaner, the city smells nice in the morning.

Until you find the meaning of listen.

It is not very often that I hear a song on an mp3 blog that I like so much I immediately reference it on my blog.

Said the Gramophone has a new blog post featuring songs by Stone Jack Jones which sound like Tom Waits singing with Leslie Feist and are very very good.

And if you aren't reading Said the Gramophone on a daily basis, you should start.

This is our problem tonight

Rain is flooding the Bay Area but I made it to the Great American Music Hall to see Aberdeen City open for Rasputina.

Going to mid-size shows only to see the opening act is always a little disappointing. Aberdeen City's set was a little over a half hour with about 5 minutes devoted to technical difficulties when the drummer broke a microphone. Rob McCaffrey was playing drums with two broken fingers and food poisoning and still managed to bang the drums hard enough to break something. (Of course, Brad Parker (vocals, guitar/bass guitar) said Rob was playing through the pain. I try to refrain from putting too much stock in between song banter.) The band managed to put forth a strong set though with "God is going to get sick of me" being a highlight.

I look forward to these guys returning to the Bay Area and headlining Bottom of the Hill or the Independent in the near future.

If you haven't gotten a hold of their debut album, The Freezing Atlantic, you can listen to my favorite song off the album here:

Sixty Lives.mp3 (3680.0K)

Next, go buy the album here. The art for the band website and album is beautiful! Even the SFist likes them!

What's good for your soul will be bad on your nerves

For over a year, I've had a great recording of a Jenny Lewis solo show from June 10, 2004, so there weren't a lot of surprises for me when I finally heard Rabbit Furcoat. It is good, really good.

If "I Never" was your favorite song on the last Rilo Kiley album &/or you like Neko Case, you'll like the new album set to be released on January 24th. (The album leaked on to the internet a few weeks ago.)

You can't call Rabbit Furcoat Jenny Lewis' solo album because The Watson Twins are there too. However, the standout tracks ("It Wasn't Me" and "Melt Your Heart") benefit because Jenny's voice dominates with all other vocals minimal or non-existent.

I recommend listening to the cover of the Traveling Wilburys' "Handle With Care" over at gorilla vs. bear. It features Jenny and the Watson Twins with additional vocals from Conor Oberst, M. Ward, and Ben Gibbard.

The only song from the live show at The Echo that didn't make the record is here:

Somebody Else's Clothes.mp3 (3682.3K)

There is a reason why it isn't on the album. It's a good song, but the twelve songs on Rabbit Furcoat are better.