Category: Music

Thanks (or no thanks) to Greg for this one:

He beat it (beat it!) / beat iiiii-i-i-i-iiiit (beat it!) / Nooo-o-o-o-ooo one wants to be-e-e-e-eeeeee de-fee-e-e-e-eeee-ated!

Of course, we’re talking about yesterday’s news. And Tony has an interesting take on the jury vs. the media in the trial.

Sometime in the mid 1990s a lot of bands stopped feeling good. Blame the rap-metal bands, blame Radiohead, but good old fashioned rock party music largely disappeared from the airwaves. If there is any justice in the world (a dubious proposition at best), the new record from Tsar should bring back the heyday of window-open singalong guitar party rock in a way it hasn’t been heard since that album that the guys from Guns ’n’ Roses never recorded with the kids from Green Day.

Tsar are very good at a very old rock and roll tradition: exploring someone else’s sound and making it your own. The band has been kicking around LA since 2000 (and has been a darling of the blogosphere for at least that long, thanks to Tony Pierce’s tireless hype), and releases its first album for TVT this month. So the big question is: does the band live up to the hype?

Do they ever. Band Girls Money is a straight-ahead high octane dose of jet fuelled ear candy. Tsar claim to be descended from glam idols T. Rex and sugar poppers the Archies (and they work the glamdrogynous look in the cover art), but there are equal parts John Lennon and Cracker-era David Lowery in Jeff Whalen’s insanely fluid vocals, and the guitars simultaneously recall the high points of pre-Thin White Duke Bowie, the Ramones, and the Jesus & Mary Chain.

Incidentally, if this reads like a critics’ game of “List the Influences,” that’s because every track invokes a different set of very specific rock references. “Superdeformed” is the most explicit, checking the Beatles in both the chorus (though this writer would dispute the claim that “the Beatles never got you high”) and in Whalen’s Lennonesque “all riiiight,” which sounds like an alternate take of the chorus for “Revolution.” But other tracks hit different reference points: “Straight” plays like the Ramones doing a “One Tree Hill” soundtrack song (in a good way), “Wanna Get Dead” has the aforementioned JnMC vibe (specifically, “Coast to Coast” from Automatic), and the rhythm section intro leading into the sustained guitar note that opens “The Love Explosion” plays for all the world like a sped-up version of the opening to Radiohead’s “There There.” But the songs are all clearly original—the reference points are there as hommages, not as imitations, and for the most part if you blink you miss them. You know, aside from the part where Tsar are reinventing the whole glam genre.

Then there’s Whalen’s lyrics… They aren’t deep, mostly cocky cock-rock (“He’s got the band, the girls, and the money”, “It’s hard to stand up with all the girls on your lap”), but they would probably be a lot of fun to sing along with if the band included a lyrics sheet.

Which is one of my only two complaints about this disc. The other, the DRM on it that prevented it from going on my iPod so I could take it with me everywhere, is a little less forgivable. But the rock is so good, I’m almost over that. And if you know me, you know that’s saying a lot.

If Spoon’s Gimme Fiction is this summer’s party album choice for the intelligent indie pop fan, Tsar’s Band Girls Money is this summer’s party album choice for everybody else—and for the intelligent indie pop fan when he thinks no one else is looking. This band is some serious rock’n’roll fun.

Originally posted on Blogcritics.

As a (former) professional online behavior analyst, when my own online behavior changes, I take notice. So when I realized that I am waiting for albums to become available on eMusic rather than buying them on iTunes; regularly buying several 50-tune booster packs per month; and now have a “Save for Later” list containing 47 albums, I conclude that I have developed a preference for eMusic.

What’s changed? Two things: selection and currency. eMusic has added a ton of labels recently, including Merge, Sun, Vice Recordings, the always excellent Bloodshot Records, Misra, Thirsty Ear… a bunch of indies releasing some great music. (Many of these are available on iTMS as well; more on that in a minute.) Second, new releases are now being made available through eMusic on or very close to the street date. Take a look at my purchase of Spoon’s Gimme Fiction. On the old eMusic it might have taken several months to make it there; not any more.

eMusic also, I reluctantly conclude, has a substantial navigability advantage over the iTMS. The iTunes store sometimes feels shoehorned into the iTunes interface: no browsing options other than big column lists and search; live hyperlinks for artist browsing, but not label or year; no user reviews; and so on. I’ve found more good music by browsing at eMusic in the last month than I had for the previous few on the iTMS, primarily by browsing by label, then the artist list.

Other advantages of eMusic: high bit rate MP3s (no DRM); ability to re-download purchased tracks; and price. Yeah, did I mention price? Sure, buying by the track is sometimes no bargain, but when the price is 50 tracks for $14.95, I almost don’t care, since buying the equivalent 50 tracks in the iTMS might cost me $50. If the iTMS had the songs, the convenience of buying a la carte instead of in a monthly subscription or booster pack might make it likely for me to buy there, but it’s not a lock any more, not by a long shot.

I’m not giving up on the iTMS. It’s still the only place for me to find music from most of the majors, for instance. But more often than not, I’m looking for the minors instead.

One final thought: eMusic is even gaining the edge in the “delight” factor for me. This is the technical marketing term for what happens when a business not only fulfills a customer’s expectations and requirements but surpasses them in a big way. I was trying to find a song by the Ukrainians that I had gotten on a mix tape (from Fury, as it turns out) about twelve years ago. I knew a transliteration of the title (“O Sweet Girl”) but not the original Ukrainian title, so Googling it seemed difficult. Eventually I gave up, deciding that while I might be able to find it on a peer-to-peer network, it probably wasn’t worth it. I then Googled another artist, 3 Mustaphas 3, and found a hit to them on eMusic. While it wasn’t the album I was looking for, the description of the album talked about … the Ukrainians. Sure enough, eMusic had the band, and amazingly had the exact song (“Oi Divchino”) I was looking for, which I verified by listening to the sound clip. I purchased it there, of course.

The odds that I could find the Ukrainians at the iTMS? Slim.

Hey, Apple: there’s Long Tail style profit to be made in increasing your depth in some of these indie labels. Why are they listing digital content on eMusic and not on you? And why don’t you make it easier for me to experience serendipity on the store? Is it really helpful for me to know that “Hollaback Girl” is still #1 in Today’s Top Songs? eMusic gives me tailored recommendations, not a top 10 list. Guess which one I’m more likely to buy from?

New mix, decades longer than you, posted at Art of the Mix and the iTunes Music Store. Extensive song-by-song notes and a bonus illustration, shamelessly cribbed from Questionable Content, are at AotM.

Salon.com: iTunes free download: M.I.A.’s “Galang”. I downloaded this today and was rocking it all the way into work—a good forty-minute drive on a wet windy day like today. If, like me, you were too lame to download Maya Arulpragasam’s debut album illicitly when it was all the buzz, at least check out the free single.

In happier music news, Sleater-Kinney released their seventh album (wow!) (and their first on Sub Pop) yesterday. In checking out the publicity for the release, I made my way to their official page, where I found the Sleater-Kinney blog. Yep, all three members of the band writing about touring, Revenge of the Sith, breaking feet (get well, Carrie), being interviewed, and other fun stresses of the road. No comments, alas, and no RSS, but it’s definitely a start. Notes on the album when I actually get a chance to listen to it. (I love my new company, but the open floor plan isn’t the most conducive to rocking out.)

I somehow missed this, but Low’s Alan Sparhawk wrote on the band’s forum at the beginning of the month that the band has cancelled its shows for May and June (and probably beyond) because he is coping with undiagnosed mental distress, probably depression. As much as it hurts to see someone go through this, I’m really glad that it’s playing out this way and not with a police report, as it did for Elliott Smith. Alan, take all the time you need to get well. We can wait to hear the music.

Man. I wish the iTunes Music Store folks would get their acts together and consistently update the New Releases and Just Added pages. As a music addict, I generally await Tuesdays like I await my first cup of coffee in the morning, and I just can’t get going without my fix. So it’s a good thing that the store’s banner ads at least are up to date; they advised me that the new release from Spoon, Gimme Fiction, is available.

I was looking forward to the release because the lead single, “I Turn My Camera On,” was excellent—a bit like an indie white boy version of Prince, only more swagger-y. But after the disappointment with the new music listings, I thought, I wonder if it’s available at eMusic instead? Sure enough. And buying a fifty-song booster pack let me download the album, plus recordings by Ali Farka Toure, Gene Ammons, Red Garland, and Material for just a few dollars more than the Spoon album by itself would cost at the iTMS.

Also available, and according to Fury worth hearing, is the new recording of Pierre Boulez conducting his own Le Marteau Sans Maitre. (And thanks to Fury for hipping me to the Gurgling Cod, which just got added to my list of favorite Boston area blogs.)

Finally, I happened to be in our local indy record store (okay, chain) this weekend, and found a copy of Godspeed You Black Emperor’s F#, A#, (∞) on vinyl, about which the band’s official discography page says it best:

initially limited to 500 numbered copies, then repressed. hand-made jacket, with one of three actual photographs glued on to the front. comes with a bag of goodies, including a penny flattened by a train. each track fills a side, and is made up of different pieces. side b runs out into a locked groove.

It is not a knock against the recording to say that last night, in a somewhat exhausted state, it took me about ten minutes to realize that the album runs out into a locked groove; the musical effect is quite consistent with the rest of that side. F#, A#, ∞, indeed. But what a cool album (even without the bag of goodies). And apparently, the only way to get the experience is on vinyl, since the band remastered and re-recorded portions for the 1998 CD release. (See the aforementioned discography page for some MP3 samples of the CD version.)

It looks like my debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra will actually be a Pops concert, or concert series to be precise. I’ll be performing in the Pops’s “Red, White and Blue” program for three performances in June. (I’m intrigued by the listing of an oud soloist on the program; haven’t seen the music yet so anything could be happening with that!) Then in July I’ll be at Tanglewood for Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, which it appears is the “opening night” program.

It’s a good thing my SAT classes are almost over. Rehearsals are about to consume a lot of my time.

This weekend as I was driving around in the rain with Charlie, I was playing “The Drowning Man” from the Cure’s seminal 1981 release Faith on the car stereo. My friend asked, “Which band is this?” When I told him it was the Cure, he said, “Oh. There have been so many new bands coming out that sound like the Cure, I wasn’t sure whether it was one of them or the real thing.”

Which is to say, this new series of double-disc reissues of the Cure’s early albums, which started last fall with Three Imaginary Boys and continues tomorrow with Seventeen Seconds, Pornography, and Faith, could not come at a more auspicious time. Thanks to bands like Interpol and Bloc Party, which owe debts to Robert Smith’s moody musical style and eccentric vocals respectively, the time is ripe for a rediscovery of the Cure’s legacy. And this series of reissues is definitely the right way to do it.

The sound on this reissue is gorgeously clean. At this point in their history, the revolving Cure line-up was down to a core of three: Smith on vocals and lead, Simon Gallup on bass, and Laurence Tolhurst on drums, with keyboardist Matthieu Hartley abruptly leaving days before the recording session started. Slimmed down to the elemental basics, the band’s playing is honed tight, with Gallup’s big bass sound up front and Smith’s guitars washing over the mix. (For better or worse, this is also the release where, perhaps to fill in some of the gaps in the mix, Smith started reverbing the hell out of his vocals.)

And some of the songs on this disc are stone classics. The major lyrical inspirations for the songs are said to be the death of “several friends and relations” and the terminal illness of Tolhurst’s mother, and that combined with Smith’s meditations on faith and disbelief provide the thematic core for the album. There is a broad sonic range within the basic bleakness of the album: “Primary” and “Other Voices,” which both appear on the excellent Staring at the Sea compilation, are jittery, paranoid fun, as is “Doubt,” while “The Funeral Party,” “The Drowning Man,” and “Faith” are majestic, epic stretches of unremitting rainy darkness. This release is where the Cure found the heart of darkness that was only hinted in earlier songs. The band wouldn’t release another album that was so thoroughly and completely dark until Disintegration closed out their classic period at the end of the 1980s, but the darkness that flowered on Faith is what many still consider to be the Cure’s classic sound, and it would reappear lyrically or musically on almost every other Cure release.

The bonus material is excellent on this release, as with the others in the series. Rounding out Disc 1 is a 27-minute instrumental called “Carnage Visors,” a soundtrack to a 1981 tour film and previously available on the cassette version of Faith. Disc 2 consists of home demos and studio out-takes of the “Faith” material, three previously unreleased songs cut during the Faith sessions, and majestic live performances from the summer of 1981. Disc 2 closes with the Cure’s landmark 1981 single “Charlotte Sometimes,” previously available on the Staring at the Sea compilation, in which the dead ground covered by the Faith sessions yields a sinisterly beautiful flower, a perfect goth pop single.

On April 26, the Cure release expanded editions of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography. To hear some of the tracks from all three releases, check out The Cure Sampler Listening Party.

If you are going to buy more than one Cure CD and would like to save money, go to the Rhino website.

Review originally posted at BlogCritics.

Via Boing Boing and Joi Ito, the free music download directory at Amazon. Don’t get too excited, though: except for a handful of exclusives (such as a soporific b-side from Moby’s latest album), many of the interesting tracks on the Amazon site are widely available elsewhere, including the artists’s own sites and Salon’s Daily Download (registration or daily pass required).

The interesting bit about Amazon’s service is that it links to everyone’s downloads, not just the interesting ones. So if you were looking for a jazz cover of “California Here I Come,” Amazon is the place. But don’t expect to find buzzworthy singles without a lot of searching. That, after all, is what MP3 blogs are for.

What is more interesting to me is the fact that so many sites like this exist to point people to what is essentially advertising. There is a real ecosystem around free MP3s, and you can see how they can build real buzz around an artist. Look at Bloc Party, for instance; pretty well unknown stateside prior to last fall, but with the help of a free MP3 for their Cure-meets-Thin-Lizzy “Banquet” they were a big favorite going into SXSW. Not surprising that savvy labels like Sub Pop are using free downloads intelligently and programmatically (check the Downloads RSS Feed) to build buzz.

Your Scary ’80s 3 and Your Scary ’80s 4 have been posted on the iTMS store (3, 4) and on Art of the Mix. As with the previous ’80s mixes, the odd numbered one is all the tracks you wish you could forget, and the even numbered one is the one with stuff that you wish you heard the first time they came out.

A Crank’s Progress: your wish is my command. Translation of AKMA’s should-be-famous quotation about the media industries vs. their customers into a Creative Communists bumper sticker:

Nicely done, Paul.

Nuff said, really. I found I was getting that first-of-the-month-so-my-EMusic-account-has-reloaded-new-music-jones on Tuesday (yes, several days late—it’s been that kind of month, thankyouverymuch) and so tonight I decided heck with it, it’s after 10, I’m going to go to EMusic and download some stuff.

An hour later, what do I have to show for it? Two tracks. Out of 40. Doing that math, the download will be done sometime around dinner tomorrow.

Maybe I’ll just have to arrange a visit to the Asheville Starbucks—the only place around that I’m sure has WiFi—tomorrow to wrap things up.

(For the curious, I’m waiting for Sam Prekop’s eponymous release, Coldplay’s debut EP, Chet Baker’s Chet, disc 6 of Bill Evans’s The Last Waltz, and the Black Keys’s Thickfreakness. All of which should be fabulous if I can ever hear them.)

(Also for the curious and new readers, my parents only have dialup because (a) my dad only does email and (b) they can only get satellite, not cable and (c) satellite-based high-speed is pretty expensive for a retiree and (d) they’re pretty far out in the country so well out of range for DSL.)