is this funny?

remember veruca salt? sort of weezer for the boys. decent fun, anyhow. then nina gordon left the band (she was the cuter one!) and started a solo career. the results were so horrible that you have probably never heard any of her stuff. i mean really horrible. anyhow, when i saw that she had done a cover of N.W.A. I thought maybe she had snapped out of it, stopped making whiny crap and would perhaps deliver something interesting. instead, it sounds like this. this is so incredibly bad. i can not believe how bad it is. it makes me laugh. but it also makes me a bit nauseous. therefore i had to post it. for nina's sake i hope that ice cube never hears this. but then again, i don't really care.

calla et al

what else is new. well, calla is preparing a new album - first taste over at www.callamusic.com. not disagreeable at all. caribou has been spinning but not scoring the points that manitoba managed to get. 13+god, the collaboration of themselves and notwist, is a little disappointing - each band is, well, absolutely fabuous (esp. notwist) but thinks don't really click here. the queens of the stone age, which i secretly love, aren't doing it for me either. the best track already appear on the desert sessions 124-125. still fun though. thee silver mount zion.... have been singing too much. british sea power is overpolished. hell, everything just seems crap these days.

lucky pierre

how did i miss this? arab strap's moffat has a side project! and touchpool is his second album. my, my! arab strap never really sounded like the very up to speed with technology with their simple drum programming but apparently moffat has a few tricks up his sleeve. lucky pierre is electronic, slightly cinematic perhaps. pretty pleasant.

enon

one of my big regrets in life is never to have seen brainiac live. sigh. it was a brilliant band and if you haven't checked them out you should. john schmersal formed enon after brainiac disappear from our sight after releasing an album under the name john stuart mill in between. jsm was in some ways a big departure from brainiac being almost acoustic but enon at first represented a return to a territority not dissimilar from brainiac. then enon took a different turn. and then several more. anyhow, lost marbles and exploded evidence is a collection of b-sides and other stuff that enon has released over the years. some of it is brilliant some of it not so much so. but then it is fun and inventive. the sample sort of represents pieces of both with the schmersal "part" of the song sounding very much like the direction brainiac was heading in towards the end.

webjay

improved services by ghostdogjr -- on the right hand side you should be able to find a new link to webjay followed by a few tracks. click the link and you will be transported to ghostdogjr's webjay page where you can listen to the playlist that has been set up there -- sort of like radio ghostdogjr.... the songs are a mix of the old and the new for now but do not include the samples I throw on this page. and if you get bored with me you can always find other good music on webjay.org. also, i would appreciate a comment if you try it out and like it - or dislike it.

kristen

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i caught kristen opening up for deerhof in berlin over a year ago and, well, i was truely impressed by them - and not only because it was the first polish indie band i've heard. live their sound was a bit polvoesque - i couldn't honestly say that i liked all their songs but the good ones were really damn good. on record they sound quite different - somewhere between the jazzy leanings of karate and, well, sort of the tortoise/chicago sound. really damn nice actually.

intransitive preferences, iia, or extreme preference change?

again pitchforkmedia is the subject - they just published there best albums 2000-2004. and you may recall that not to long ago they published their top 50 for 2004. interestingly enough arcade fire - funeral was choosen the best of the rest in 2004. Yet it only makes it to no. 45 in the period 2000-2004. so was 2004 such a bad year in music compared to the previous four? well, not really according to the results: no. 9 animal collective - sung tongs, no. 13 madvillain - madvillainy, no. 18 devandra banhart - rejoicing in the Hands, no. 25 brian wilson - smile (sic!), no. 36 the streets - a grand don't come for free, no. 37 ghostface - the pretty toney album, and no. 40 the fiery furnaces - blueberry boat. obviously there is some inconsistency here. or did pitchforkmedia happen to change its preferences so radically over the course of a month or so? a more likely explanation are the rules used to come up with the ranking - i.e. the may not guarantee transitivity (if A is better than B, B is better than C, then A must be better than C) or perhaps it just fails on the independence of irrelevant alternatives (like when the presence of Ralph Nader determines the outcome of what is really a contest between Gore and Bush in 2000 - maybe?). at any rate, although i don't disagree a whole lot with the list, this just goes to show that lists like these are rather meaningless and we can all just relax....

bossa nova part II

Nouvelle Vague - st

somewhere I read that nouvelle vague is french for bossa nova (portugese) and new wave (english). so, if camping's flirt with bossa nova seemed like destined for failure then nouvelle vagues' album seemed doubly so. basically, this is an album of bossa nova covers of joy division, pil, the clash, dead kennedys, the sisters of mercy, the cure, and others. basically songs that don't really lend themselves to the treatment they receive here in an obvious way. naturally, the results are a little mixed but overall it is an inspired effort and the successes (or not) are not where you expect to find them. e.g, the depeche mode doesn't quite work as well as it should while the cover of love will tear us apart works pretty well, perhaps because the band avoids giving too straight of a reading of the song. perhaps the biggest surprise is too drunk to fuck, which has never sounded as intoxicatingly fun. the greatest asset of this album is that it doesn't succumb to thinking of itself as a "fun bossa nova project" but attempts instead to focus on what it was that made many of these songs so great to begin with while offering a different interpretation.

bossa nova time part I

Camping - Suburban Shore

well, not your grandma's bossa nova really. for one thing the singer sings in german, which admittedly doesn't seem right ... although it ends up sounding quite right. the rest of the trio has also released cds under the name chessie sounding more like m83's kind of shoegazing and occasionally that sounds creeps through the bossa nova. a combination somehow unlikely to succeed (on so many levels) but nevertheless the trio pulls it off effortlessly and beautifully.

silkworm - cotton girl (acoustic)

i just rediscovered this song. an acoustic cover of their own - insanely brilliant and much better than the original electric version.

sage frances

oh, and check a couple of sage's tunes out at syrdurrjomi.blogspot.com. His new one is not bad at all - not that one would have expected that from his previous albums with or with-out the non-prophets.

what's spinnin'

well that damn list has prevented to post anything else for a while. so it looks like the year starts with a whimper and not a band. disappointing releases all over the place. bright eyes' albums were subpar - although there are some good songs inbetween. trail of dead was likewise a huge disappointment as i have mentioned earlier. and now, lou barlow emerges with a album so boring that it hurts. i think somewhere along the road i just completely lost my patience for lou. yeps, sebadoh was great but the more i think about it, lou's whining was the least attractive bit of the equation. and, of course, i don't like the way he holds his bass. but all is not lost, amon tobin's soundtrack (game not movie) is pretty "nice" - "nice" because it is kinda nightmarish and scary. not his most brilliant but damn it actually makes me want to get the game it was written for. prefuse 73's new album is also promising and includes contributions from almost anyone who is worth anything - including my what's-her-name in blonde redhead. busdriver also has a new album that sounds quite interesting as well. and finally, cloud cult released an album last year that was, well, interesting. earthy types these guys i'll tell you. i don't like the earthy types but the songs don't appear to be too recycled. check 'em out here. and here

at last at last

that took a while. and i certainly regret it. and now i have decided lists are stupid and serve no purpose except to upset people. i came to this realization reading pitchforkmedia's top 100 singles 2000-2004 (as well after spending lots of time tracking down their top 50 singles of 2004). this must be some sort of an in-joke, right? justin and britney in the top 20? lcd soundsystem with two entries in the top 20? are there different standards for singles? or do none of the "regular" people release single anymore? or is pitchfork the new rolling stones? counter-revolution please!

one

Blood Brothers - Crimes

i guess this album represented a little change of pace for the blood brothers. there is a little new wave feel there i guess - at least that's what i thought when i first listened to the album but i can't really hear it anymore. now it just sounds like frantic screaming and wailing. well, not exactly, the music is actually quite "nice" and the two vocalists really make my day. but most importantly it all comes together in a solid whole. although this album is just mountains of fun i can't somtimes help notice it because i get too impressed with how the vocals and the instruments fit together. at any rate, certainly not the prettiest of this bunch but it is worth testing your patience with.

two

Madvillain - Madvillainy

well yeah, it should be apparent that i'm a sucker for mf doom. this album is just so brilliantly inventive that i have no words to describe it. and i'm not going to try. hip hop's biggest leap forward since public enemy.

three

Detachment Kit - Of this blood

the album starts of like the decemberists then kicks into gear with a song better than anything trail of the dead aspired to (ok, i'm pissed at the trail for their lame new album) before visiting the world brainiac left vacant a few years back. and then we get the prettiest song released last year. this band is just fucking amazing - most bands are content with sticking with one genre and doing it decently. not here. this band is also responsible for the best show i caught last year. devastating. how can i choose just one song? another one

four

Patrick Wolf - Lycanthropy

damn kids. don't the talented seem to get younger each year. or maybe it is just me. the new connor oberst with a taste for cabaret? it certainly shares some of the splendid theatrics that oberst is (was?) capable of. musically it is a mixture of electronics and more traditional instruments. very impressive, very addictive.

five

Arcade Fire - Funeral

if last year was any band's year it was arcade fire's year. one moment they were nowhere, the next they were on the top of the world. accordingly they are the band we would love to hate. but we can't. and i'm sure you know by now. and for god's sake, if you get a chance to see them live, do it.