Category: Music

I’ve written in this space before about Mission of Burma—both about their recent limited edition singles and the live show where I saw them open for the Pixies. I got their new release, The Obliterati, last week, which came with a limited edition concert DVD. And damned if the show they filmed wasn’t from that December 2nd show at the Tsongas Arena, opening for the Pixies.

I haven’t really had the time to absorb the show in detail yet; hell, I haven’t finished listening to The Obliterati all the way through. But I did see enough of the DVD to note that yes, the live show was just as amazing as I remember it, and yes, the crowd was about as sessile as I wrote.

It’s a heckuva present to get a memento of that memory, though. Thanks, guys.

I was able to take a day off today—much needed. Didn’t do much of anything really—though I did move forward on The Great CD Project. (Incidentally, I ended up following a combination of the two approaches I outlined in my prior post. I made the new drive a standalone concatenated RAID array using the diskutil command, told iTunes to move the music files there (using the Advanced tab of the Preferences, then using Advanced | Consolidate Music Library to move all the files there), and then used diskutil to add the old external drive to the RAID array. I had to unmount both external drives first before diskutil would allow me to join the second disk to the RAID array. The final result: one 744.5 GB logical disk. Yeah.) Current Project status: 12,858 songs; 286.52 GB; 38 days, 22 hours, 22 minutes, and 23 seconds of music.

So today’s list is from the iTunes library…

1. Herman’s Hermits, “White Wedding” (When Pigs Fly)
2. Dock Boggs, “Pretty Polly” (Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years)
3. Paul Chambers, “Omicron” (Whims of Chambers)
4. Sex Pistols, “Pretty Vacant” (Never Mind the Bollocks)
5. Big Star, “Way Out West” (Radio City)
6. Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, “Er ging aus der Kammersein v. 4” (Michael Praetorius) (In Dulci Jubilo)
7. Christian McBride, “Jayne” (Number Two Express)
8. Hilliard Ensemble, “In III Nocturno, Responsorium 1” (Gesualdo) (Tenebrae)
9. Material, “Ciquiri” (Secret Life)
10. New Order, “Age of Consent” (Power, Corruption, and Lies)

I got back from San Francisco at 10 am this morning and spent the rest of the day catching up on email. But now I can breathe again, and it’s time for a special Random 10—since I’m sitting at my Mac, this will be an iTunes driven list rather than off my poor little iPod.

1. Smashing Pumpkins, “Shame” (Adore)
2. G Love and Special Sauce, “Stepping Stones” (Yeah It’s That Easy)
3. Liz Phair, “Whitechocolatespaceegg” (Whitechocolatespaceegg)
4. Miles Davis, “Introduction by Mort Fega” (The Complete Concert 1964)
5. Radiohead, “I Am a Wicked Child” (Go to Sleep, Pt 2)
6. Frank Sinatra, “The Gal That Got Away” (The Complete Capitol Singles Collection)
7. U2, “Some Days Are Better Than Others” (Zooropa)
8. Chris Isaak, “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” (Baja Sessions)
9. R.E.M., “I Believe” (Life’s Rich Pageant)
10. Bono, “Never Let Me Go” (Million Dollar Hotel)

Something I neglected to mention in my post yesterday about this latest illness was the solid eight hours of sleep I got yesterday, on top of eight hours last night. Today I feel odd; rested and yet not.

I can’t wait to be done with this cold.

1. Iron & Wine, “Evening on the Ground (Lilith’s Song)” (Woman King EP)
2. Nine Inch Nails, “Get Down Make Love” (Sin)
3. Choir of Trinity College, “Singt! Ihr lieben Christen all” (In Dulci Jubilo)
4. Lascivious Biddies, “BiddyCast: Camp Conway”
5. Peter Schickele, “Closing” (Two Pianos are Better Than One)
6. The Clash, “Hateful” (London Calling)
7. R.E.M., “Be Mine” (New Adventures in Hi-Fi)
8. Bob Dylan, “Nashville Skyline Rag” (Nashville Skyline)
9. Radiohead, “Palo Alto” (Airbag/How Am I Driving?)
10. James Brown, “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved” (Funk Power 1970)

I posted a while back about an old college mix that I had posted at Art Of The Mix; at the time I thought I would be writing about more of these old mixes. Funny how time flies. But today I posted one of the pivotal mixes in my personal tape history. Graduation Lieder isn’t really mine; my cousin Greg put it together while he was working at a campus radio station and gave it to me as a high school graduation gift back in 1990.

I can’t think of too many better gifts than to be introduced to such a concentrated bundle of great music. The irony at this remove is how much the landscape was about to change. All the REM influenced college bands like the Connells, Drivin’n’Cryin’, and Camper van Beethoven, who dominated the first side of the mix were to disappear, buried under the one-two onslaught of early 90s dance music and the grunge avalanche (which Camper would ride out by transforming into Cracker). A lot of the other artists were to undergo some radical evolutions as well. Björk, Frank Black, and Ian McCulloch went solo, the former more successfully than the latter two. The Chilis went through enough evolutions to merit a separate post of their own. And whatever happened to Living Colour?

Anyway, a great artifact and something that I hope you’ll enjoy as well.

Boston Globe: BSO brings full drama to ‘Oedipus’. The Globe generally liked our performance; Richard Dyer was kind enough to note that “the men of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus sang with excellent intonation and driving rhythm”—and not to mention that we sang with scores, a first in recent memory for a non-Pops concert.

Behind the scenes, what happened? I can only say that when a work with a lengthy unfamiliar Latin text meets a conductor who doesn’t believe in singing from memory, something has to give. It actually helped: most of us were singing from memory anyway, but being able to check the scores periodically to confirm the words in some of the lengthier passages really helped.

And I still have the thing stuck in my brain, in spite of every single piece of music I’ve listened to in the last day.

(Oh, confidentially to Keith Powers at the Herald: you write really well. How on earth did you write the following two sentences together: “Dohnanyi’s conducting was precise and erudite. The orchestra sounded like it actually liked playing for the guy.” Is that the job of an editor at the Herald: to dumb down a review by inserting random sentences in dumb-guy talk?)

So in spite of the random 10 I still have “Et Oedipus irrumpere, irrumpere et pulsare, et pulsare, et pulsare, et Oedipus pulsare, pulsare, ululare!” ringing in my ears from last night’s concert—that of course being the narrative when Oedipus batters down the door of his wife Jocasta’s room and sees she’s hanged herself, cause, y’know, she’s just found out she’s also his mom.

Anyway.

• Sigur Rós, “Mea Blóanasir” (Takk…)
• London Chamber Orchestra (James MacMillan, composer), “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani” (Seven Last Words)
• Daniel Lanois, “Fisherman’s Daughter” (Acadie)
• Mission of Burma, “Nancy Reagan’s Head” (There’s a Time and Place to Punctuate)
• Yo La Tengo, “Autumn Sweater (Kevin Shields remix)” (A Smattering of Outtakes and Rarities)
• Prince, “Goodbye” (Crystal Ball)
• Bobby Bare, “I Am An Island” (The Moon Was Bare)
• Danger Doom, “No Names” (The Mouse and the Mask)
• Prince, “Call My Name” (Musicology)
• Elvis Costello, “Shallow Grave” (Costello and Nieve: Live at the Troubadour, LA)

You know it’s been a long hard week when the Random 10 is my first post since Wednesday night. Someday, on the Final Reckoning, I hope I’ll get an extra day of eternal bliss in exchange for the day I had yesterday.

Anyway, the music:

1. Alberta Adams, “Remember” (Chess Blues)
2. Choir of St. John’s College (John Tavener, composer), “Song for Athene” (Christmas Proclamation)
3. Petra Haden, “Our Love Was” (The Who Sell Out)
4. Lou Ann Burton, “Shake Your Hips” (The Oxford American Southern Music Sampler, 2005)
5. Bill Cosby, “Oops!” (I Started Out As A Child)
6. The Velvet Underground, “Foggy Notion” (Peel Slowly and See)
7. Shirley Horn, “Fever” (The Main Ingredient)
8. Solomon Burke, “Diamond In Your Mind” (Don’t Give Up On Me)
9. The Dramatics, “Get Up and Get Down” (Dead Presidents Soundtrack)
10. Billy Jones & Ernest Hare, “Barney Google” (Edison Diamond Disc)

One last note: these are the random tunes playing in my iPod, but the tune playing in my head is Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion”:

Oh little darlin’ of mine
I just can’t believe it’s so
And though it seems strange to say
I’ve never been laid so low
In such a mysterious way
And the course of a lifetime runs
Over and over again

But I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
When the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away

Special bonus: the connection between “Mother and Child Reunion” and Chinese cuisine.

On the train back to Boston with my coworker yesterday, I was looking over the sheet music for our next TFC concert when my coworker asked about my next performance. I told him, “The first week in May we‘ll be doing Stravinsky’s Œdipus Rex.”

“Cool,” he said. “I’ll have to bring my daughter. She’s thirteen and taking voice lessons. She’d love it.”

Ah, I thought. But will she—or you—love the story? It’s such a nice story too—just in time for Mother’s Day.

The music, though, is absolutely astonishing. Stravinsky wrote some of the most amazingly inventive, sinuous melody lines for this work, which sports a libretto by Jean Cocteau. I think my personal favorite is the herky-jerky chromaticism of the passage where Œdipus batters down the door, kills his mother/wife, and puts out his own eyes. The music, if you’re not careful, sounds a little like a circus act. Last night in practice it sounded like the arrival of the Furies: after a couple of rehearsals John Oliver’s intensity kicked up a notch and he urged us deeper into the meaning of the music, and the results were unsettlingly good. I am looking forward to hearing the orchestration next week.

Of course, the question is, can I in conscience recommend the piece to my co-worker? I guess I’ll have to do what I would want him to do for me when I have a kid: send him the synopsis and a pointer to some of the music and let him make up his own mind.

Quick update today. We drove all afternoon down to Lisa’s parents, including one seven-mile stretch around Newark that took about an hour. So needless to say I’m a bit mad at mechanical objects, am seeing red, have no desire to push a shopping trolley, and spent a good part of the afternoon seeing primary colors, mostly a red mix.

Ba-dum-psch.

1. Beth Orton, “Shopping Trolley” (Comfort of Strangers)
2. Woody Allen, “Mechanical Objects” (Woody Allen: Standup Comic)
3. Sundays, “24 Hours” (Blind)
4. Minus the Bear, “Fulfill the Dream” (Menos Il Oso)
5. The Cure, “Primary (Red Mix)” (Close to Me [EP])
6. Frank Sinatra, “Half as Lovely (Twice as True)” (The Capitol Singles)
7. The Stills, “Allison Krausse” (Logic Will Break Your Heart)
8. Blind Lemon Jefferson, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (Anthology of American Folk Music)
9. The White Stripes, “Forever for Her (Is Over For Me)” (Get Behind Me Satan)
10. Bob Dylan, “Walls of Red Wing” (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3)

This week’s list has a repeat, the CYHSY track (which is included according to the rules of the meme), but the rest is the usual pleasant all-over-the-map assortment. Well, mostly pleasant: once the novelty of hearing Alex Chilton’s once-great Box Tops cover Blondie’s “Call Me” wears off, you’re left with a halfhearted cover that neither illuminates the original nor says anything good about the talents of the cover artist.

Fortunately the Dock Boggs and Blind Lemon Jefferson tracks kind of balance out that track. Happy Friday, y’all.

1. Maria Callas, “O madre mia, nell’isola fatale” (La Giaconda)
2. Spacek, “Eve” (Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) Soundtrack)
3. Sufjan Stevens, “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts” (Illinoise)
4. Daniel Lanois, “Rockets” (Rockets)
5. The Box Tops, “Call Me” (When Pigs Fly)
6. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “Is This Love?” (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)
7. Dock Boggs, “Harvey Logan” (Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years)
8. Blind Lemon Jefferson, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (Anthology of American Folk Music)
9. Radiohead, “Subterranean Homesick Alien” (OK Computer)
10. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “The Curse of Millhaven” (Murder Ballads)

Mission of Burma’s plan to do a slow leak to fans of the songs from their forthcoming The Obliterati—as one song a week for eight weeks, each song released on vinyl and CD—has been tripped up twice. First, the band was overwhelmed by demand and sold out of all 500 copies in two days. Second, production problems derailed the original plans to leak one song a week. Instead, the band shipped the CD portion of the limited edition, now called “There’s a Time and Place to Punctuate,” this week, with the vinyl version to follow. The CDs were waiting for me last night when I got home from the airport, so while I was stuck in traffic this morning I listened to them in the car.

The songs are tight as ever, maybe tighter; none of the eight clock in at more than five minutes, and only one breaks the four minute mark. The band continues to evolve their sound, too; while the wall of guitars, frantic tempos, earnest screaming vocals, and tape manipulation are all familiar from previous outings, they sound fresh here thanks in part to some strong melodic writing from Clint Conley and rhythmic and melodic experimentation from Roger Miller and Peter Prescott. The strongest track of the lot, Miller’s “Careening with Conviction,” rocks out like rocking out was just invented yesterday, and Conley’s set-closing “Nancy Reagan’s Head” pulses with dark wit and angular guitar work.

On top of all this, Mission of Burma have put up an official site for the forthcoming album (due next month) that features a front-and-center wiki for fans to post their own information about the band and the recording. It also features an on-by-default music player which will selectively release all eight songs from the set over the next few weeks, so you can get the full experience.

I’ll be out of town for the first three days of next week, and the work is piling up against that hulking wall in my schedule like sand on a seawall. Funny how most Fridays feel like that these days. The most frustrating thing about it is the feeling, in spite of GTD, that things are falling through the cracks, and that “to dos” are coming in faster than I can write them down—much less work the pile down.

Today’s Random 10:

1. Violent Femmes, “Add It Up” (Add It Up (1981-1993))
2. Lou Reed, “Why Can’t I Be Good” (Faraway So Close!)
3. Sufjan Stevens, “Black Hawk War, or How To Demolish An Entire Civilization” (Illinoise)
4. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, “I Wish I Was a Mole In The Ground” (Anthology of American Folk Music)
5. Uncle Tupelo, “New Madrid” (Anodyne)
6. Vladimir Ashkenazy, “La Mer, I. De l’aube à midi sur la mer” (Debussy: La Mer, Nocturnes)
7. Gemma Hayes, “4:35 a.m.” (4:35 a.m. EP)
8. Jody Reynolds, “Endless Sleep” (the Peel Box)
9. Suzanne Vega, “World Before Columbus” (Nine Objects of Desire)
10. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “Is This Love?” (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)

What a great show. I’ve been on a Neko contact high all morning. It’s such a different experience to go to a small venue to see an artist who is genuine and unpretentious—plus has one of the biggest voices around.

Neko’s setlist was heavy on recent songs up front, with quite a few from her new album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and was rounded out by a few tracks from Blacklisted (including a superb “Deep Red Bells” and a haunting “I’ll Be Around”) and a handful of well chosen covers, including her version of “Wayfaring Stranger” (which appears on her live recording The Tigers Have Spoken) and a Buffy Ste. Marie cover whose title I didn’t quite catch. In between songs she and the band traded quips about life on the road (Neko: “I caught a whiff of myself just there and missed a chord. I don’t think I’ve ever smelled as bad in my whole life! I smell like … a salmon!”) and generally yucked it up onstage.

Points of improvement? Well, her band was competent and genuinely sparked in a few places, such as the encore numbers, but they’re no Calexico (with whose members Neko has cut the last few albums). An exception was the divine Kelly Hogan, a formidable singer in her own right, who backed up Neko on vocals. Another issue with the earlier part of the set was the nature of the songs on the new album. On record they feel like a driving collection of compressed vignettes that hang together wonderfully. On stage the songs felt short and detached from each other. The band was tight, maybe too tight—a little more room to play around with the structure of the songs and grow them a little would probably be a good thing.

But these are minor quibbles in what was ultimately a great evening. The opening act, Martha Wainright, was good too—quite funny, very salty, and another wonderful voice. Vocally she reminded me a little of Hope Sandoval, only with a broader range of high notes and with better pitch.

And that Neko contact high? I got to meet her after the show. As she signed my copy of her available-only-at-gigs Canadian Amp EP, I told her how much “Deep Red Bells” and Blacklisted in general had meant to me, and walked away happy as … a salmon, I suppose. She’s smaller in person than she looks on stage, but friendly and genuine even after playing a two hour set… and teching her own guitars on stage prior to the start of the show.

The plus side of being stuck in the JetBlue terminal at JFK on a layover between Buffalo and Boston is free wifi. The downside, of course, is being stuck in JFK.

With that, this week’s random 10:

1. Pulp, “Like a Friend” (This is Hardcore)
2. Prince, “Goodbye” (Crystal Ball)
3. Eva Osinska, “Polonaise brilliante in C major, Op. 3: Introduction (Chopin: Trio, Polonaise)
4. Dntel, “Why I’m So Unhappy” (Life is Full of Possibilities)
5. Elliott Smith, “In the Lost and Found (Hanky Bach)” (Figure 8)
6. M.I.A., “Sunshowers” (Arular)
7. Beth Orton, “Conceived” (Comfort of Strangers)
8. Radiohead, “Sail to the Moon (Brush the Cobwebs Out of the Sky)” (Hail to the Thief)
9. Drive-By Truckers, “Puttin’ People on the Moon” (The Dirty South)
10. Sigur Rós, “Takk…” (Takk…)