MMX in Review

Here’s a secret: I’m bad at ranking things.  I have a few tops (for instance, movie = Brazil), but don’t ask me to pick two through ten.  I’ve got several things that can make the list, but ordering them is impossible since it can depend on my mood or nostalgia or phases of the moon.

So while everybody else is picking their top 10 albums of the year, I’m just going to come up with a bunch of arbitrary categories instead.  This is likely just a “part one”; I don’t want to make any promises about actually updating this blog, but I’m pretty sure I’ll come up with more categories soon after I post this.

Album from 2009 Still In Heavy Rotation
Sunset Rubdown - “Dragonslayer”.  I seriously still listen to it at least two or three times a week, and it’s not even close to growing old.

Best Song With A Crazily Long Title
Los Campesinos! - A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show Me State; Or, Letters From Me to Charlotte.  Plus it looks like there’s a video or EP or something grand coming soon for this song!

Best Title Track
Xiu Xiu - Dear God, I Hate Myself.  Probably a good candidate for the theme song to my life, too.

Best Opening Track
LCD Soundsystem - Dance Yrself Clean (from “This Is Happening”).

Best Single Moment of Any Song
Also LCD Soundsystem - Dance Yrself Clean, at 3:05.  It’s my ringtone!

Best Free Album
John Vanderslice - Green Grow the Rushes

Best Cat-Related Cover Art
Sorry, Snacks the Cat, but the astro-cat from The Klaxons’ “Surfing the Void” totally shuts you out.  Maybe your owners can help you get over the heartache by sharing a bunch of their weed.

Best Dan Bejar Song
Silver Jenny Dollar from The New Pornographers’ “Together”

Best Twitterer
Jon Wurster (from Superchunk and The Mountain Goats), hands down.  Dude makes me laugh with every single post.

Best Concert Intro
Public Enemy.  They had a goddamn drum corps and marching band dance through the crowd and up to the stage!

Weirdest Concert Moment
Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian climbing along the railings of the austere DAR Constitution Hall, chucking footballs into the crowd as the rest of the band played Booker T & the MG’s “Green Onions”.

Funniest Musical Performance
Reggie Watts opening for Conan O’Brien.  Look up performances of Big-Ass Purse and Fuck Shit Stack online, but it was even better in person.

Album I Probably Would Have Liked Better If It Had More Songs With Regine Singing and Fewer With Win Singing
Arcade Fire - “The Suburbs”.  Win Butler also gets the coveted Worst Haircut award!

Best Album for Driving Fast, Singing Along, and Playing Air Drums Until You Careen Off the Interstate and Cause a Forty-Car Pileup
Superchunk - “Majesty Shredding”.  Just be sure to point at your closest wound and tell the paramedics, “oh, my gap feels weird” as they’re loading you onto the life flight helicopter.

Best Soundtrack Album
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (except for that one Teenage Dream song by T. Rex).

Predicted Names for New Subgenres in 2011
Smurfhouse.  Stutter chill.  Youtubular.  Cootie core.  Minotaur metal.

Poor impulse control

I don't think I've gone music shopping in a store since I moved, so went up to Baltimore for a Sound Garden run today.  My rationalization this time is that I need new music for a roadtrip in two weeks....of course, that road trip is to a music festival where I'll undoubtedly buy more new music, but that's beside the point. I didn't find everything I was looking for, but did get a lot of stuff from the used bin to flesh out missing items, a few new releases, and some more vinyl double-dips.

The score:

• !!! - Strange Weather, Isn't It?
• Dinosaur Jr - Where You Been
• Half Japanese - Sing No Evil
• Jaill - That's How We Burn
• Jesus and Mary Chain - Honey's Dead
• Modest Mouse - The Moon & Antarctica [vinyl 10th anniversary edition]
• Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree [vinyl]
• New Order - Movement
• Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Henry's Dream
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World soundtrack
• The Smiths - The Queen is Dead
• Xiu Xiu - A Promise

Coming soon: Hopscotch Fest!

Top Five

As mentioned by a friend, NPR this week blogged about all-time top fives.  I guess the best way for me to figure this out is through my last.fm stats, even though this misses out on anything I listen to at work (Zune doesn't scrobble my stats) and in the car (cds).  I have a feeling if it did, it would skew more towards some newer items that I don't listen to as frequently while at home.


(I'm going to scrub out duplicate artists; otherwise there'd be two Talking Heads and two Bright Eyes songs.)

#1: Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime.  This would probably still stay #1 no matter what.

#2: Interpol - Obstacle 1


#3: Bright Eyes - Lover I Don't Have to Love

#4: Residents - Fire Fall. (Dear god I wish I could search for Residents videos without getting a bunch of Resident Evil crap.)

#5: Can - Tango Whiskeyman

I bet the buttons on their facebook page are meta

I love Amazon's mp3 store, and they're having a ridiculously dangerous sale of 1000 albums for $5 each in August.  I just casually browsed for a few minutes the other night and wound up spending $20, I'm afraid to go back and look at the full list.

So far the best thing I grabbed has been the album Release Me by The Like.  They're like a 1960s girl group with modern indie pop sensibility.  Totally peppy and fun!  I first heard them a few months back when they were the opening act at a Futureheads concert; I probably should have bought the album then.  At $5, it's a steal.

Summer Mix

In between packing and moving and unpacking, I've been trying to keep up with music and also work on a good summer mix CD. I just haven't had the time to get it edited down to an actual CD's length, but then I realized that probably nobody actually burns mixes to CDs any more. The player in my car is broken and won't recognize discs most of the time, so why not just go over the limit and have a regular mp3 mix? So here it is, in all its longer-than-80-minutes-and-not-actually-mixed-together glory.

1. The Hold Steady - The Weekenders [from Heaven Is Whenever]
2. Spoon - The Mystery Zone [from Transference]
3. Wolf Parade - Cave-O-Sapien [from Expo 86]
4. Dum Dum Girls - Bhang Bhang, I'm a Burnout [from I Will Be]
5. Twin Sister - All Around and Away We Go (No Merry Go Rounds Coolrunning remix) [original from Color Your Life]
6. Wild Nothing - Chinatown [from Gemini]
7. Parenthetical Girls - Someone Else's Muse [from Privilege, Pt. 1: On Death & Endearments]
8. Crystal Castles - Celestica [from Crystal Castles]
9. Love Is All - Less Than Thrilled [from Two Thousand and Ten Injuries]
10. Wye Oak - I Hope You Die [from My Neighbor / My Creator]
11. Xiu Xiu - This Too Shall Pass Away (for Freddy) [from Dear God, I Hate Myself]
12. Signals - Angst In My Pants [not from anything yet as far as I can tell, but you can get it here]
13. Broken Social Scene - Texico Bitches [from Forgiveness Rock Record]
14. Cold Cave - Life Magazine (An Optimo (Espacio) Mix) [from Life Magazine Remixes]
15. Cassis Orange - Listen Heartbeat [from Cassis Orange EP]
16. Los Campesinos! - A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show Me State; or, Letters From Me to Charlotte [from Romance is Boring]
17. MGMT - Brian Eno [from Congratulations]
18. Yeasayer - O.N.E. [from Odd Blood]
19. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Round and Round [from Before Today]
20. Best Cosat - Something in the Way [from Something in the Way]
21. LCD Soundsystem - Home [from This is Happening]
22. The New Pornographers - Silver Jenny Dollar [from Together]
23. Roky Erickson and Okkervil River - Goodbye Sweet Dreams [from True Love Cast Out All Evil]

You can download the playlist here for a limited time.

Collectible

I got an email alert the other day letting me know that Animal Collective's "film" Oddsac is coming out on DVD soon.  I saw it in the theater a few months back, and at the time remarked that I liked it enough that I was eagerly anticipating a home release.  It had a hypnotic beauty and all the goofy weirdness you'd expect, and so much of the music was wonderful.  It's somewhat more in the vein of Merriweather Post Pavillion than Fall Be Kind, but it's just as much about the visuals and how they combine with the music.

If you pre-order you can get $5 off the price, and it also comes with a 40 page art book.  Me, I'm getting it for the 5.1 surround mix.

My upcoming disaster film

Recently I tried to help a friend with 48 Hour Film Festival. Last year I was one of the primary writers, and it was a blast. This year....I don't know. I feel like I did a good job when in the phase of brainstorming for premises, but once it came time to actually write the script I just whiffed. Writing for me needs a spark, and I have to be in the zone, and I simply couldn't get there. This has always been one of my problems, I'll go through a burst of mass creativity where I can produce work quickly, work that even I find to be quality. And then comes an inevitable spell of nothingness, where the ideas just disappear. I suppose every writer must deal with this, and it's one of the main reasons I've never really pursued this professionally.

But today I feel like I had some more of those creative bursts, albeit of the stupid kind. I can be doing anything when a muse strikes and I either have to lose it forever or get it out on any medium. -- even if it happens to be twitter. I somehow got the idea for a bad Hollywood disaster film based on recent events. Entire scenes and characters were forming in my head, but this is all I got out (with minor edits and formatting adjustments):

GRIZZLED SEA VETERAN appears and scrapes nails along chalkboard.

GRIZZLED SEA VETERAN
If you want to stop the oil leak, you've got to THINK like an oil leak!
[...]

EVIL BIOPETROPALEONTOLOGIST dips finger into thick GOO, then brings it up to his mouth for a taste.




EVIL BIOPETROPALEONTOLOGIST
This is from Devonian era ferns (pause) but also Jurassic-era apatosaurus!  This is CROSS-STRATA OIL!
[...]



PRESIDENT
(cont. speech)
We're going to live on!  We're going to survive!  Today we celebrate our Oil Independence Day! 

Yeah. I kept trying to work in some sort of sludge monster, but was hampered by the 140 character limit. A few other people were also chipping in with some pretty good ideas. And I definitely want the biopetropaleontologist to be played by Willem Dafoe.

I need a movie camera, dammit.


I have no idea what the hell blogger is doing to my formatting in the script box. Maybe it's just chrome. Sorry if it's not word-wrapping properly.

That time of the month

I'm supposed to be packing up to move to a new place, and the last thing I need is more clutter.  But I also get that itch where I have to fulfill my needs, and it hit pretty hard this week.  One thing lead to another and I found myself at Sound Garden slurping up music.  I got a good mix of new things, used items, and a couple vinyl double dips of favorite albums I wanted on that media format.  (If they hadn't been out of the deluxe version of Disintegration, I absolutely would have snatched that up, too.)

Vinyl:
Camera Obscura - The Nights are Cold 7"
Cold Cave - Life Magazine
Depreciation Guild - Spirit Youth
Dum Dum Girls - Jail La La 7"
Galaxie 500 - Today
The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee

CD:
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today
Blitzen Trapper - Destroyer of the Void^*
CocoRosie - Grey Oceans
Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles
The Fall - Totally Wired
Kaki King - Junior
Talking Heads - Little Creatures  (hard to believe I didn't already have this)
Teenage Fanclub - Shadows

I swear I'm absolutely not buying any more music until I've moved.  And by "absolutely", I mean "probably".

^* Half the reason I got this is because my eyes are intrinsically lured in by the word "Destroyer"

For Scores of Twenty Years Ago

Today I read a commemoration of The Goonies' 25th Anniversary.  I happened to catch most of it on TV a few weeks ago, as it's one of those nostalgic films that just grabs my attention if I stumble upon it.  But one thing that really struck me was how great the score was, especially the "Fratelli Chase" song.  Just a few notes of that take me back instantly to the movie.  And then I realized -- I don't know any modern movie scores.  When did they get so boring, or replaced by shitty popular music?  If the Goonies were remade today, is there any doubt that the opening segment would instead be drowned out by some popular "alternative" band who just happens to be represented by the music arm of the conglomerate that owns the movie studio?  (Yes, I know the Cyndi Lauper segment kind of invalidates my whole thesis.)

Think back to all the classic scores.  Jaws.  The Godfather.  Raiders of the Lost Ark.  The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.  (My personal pick for Best Score Ever:  Aguirre the Wrath of God, with the music by Popol Vuh.  It so perfectly fits the mood and visuals.)  Is there anybody still making them like John Williams and Ennio Morricone?  Hans Zimmer seems to win tons of awards, but I can't say he has a distinct style that stands out to me, or has done anything that really holds in my subconscious.  I like Clint Mansell's work, though it's mostly just that Requiem for a Dream song that gets used in all the trailers.  (I also preferred him back in Pop Will Eat Itself, but that's another story.)

I suppose the real issue is that for the most part scores have been replaced by soundtracks, and all too often those are the lazy way out.  If I see one more montage of lonely people over a sappy love song, one more dude walking away from an explosion in slow motion to crap rock, one more Aerosmith anything I'm going to puke.  A good soundtrack can be a wonderful thing, but for every Tarantino out there who picks perfect yet unexpected songs (krautrock in a kung fu flick!) there are 50 directors going for cheap emotional tugs or a Family Guy-esque "Hey, do you remember [x]? I love the 80s!" nod.  Put some effort into it, people!

Favorite album of May

A lot of great music came out in June, particularly several new albums by bands I love. Some held up better then others.  The new Hold Steady was initially very disappointing; it's growing on me some (especially The Weekenders), but it's still a weak effort overall and the mix just sounds wrong.  The New Pornographers' Together is good but doesn't match up to Electric Version or Twin Cinema.  Broken Social Scene's Forgiveness Rock Record starts out wonderful, and mostly is, but falls apart a bit in the second half and is just too long overall.

So leave it to LCD Soundsystem to reign supreme.*

Generally when one album is finished I switch to a different one, I don't like listening to things on repeat.  But This Is Happening is a rare exception, and it's been in my car almost nonstop since release...just like their previous record.  To paraphrase Roger Ebert, I love love love love this album.  I love the Talking Heads and Gary Numan homages.  I love that moment three minutes into Dance Yrself Clean where the song kicks into overdrive.  I love the self-deprecation and goofiness.  It may not be quite as fresh as Sound of Silver, but James Murphy set such a high bar beforehand that I'll let that slide.  (And nothing fully matches up to just how amazing Someone Great is, but that's in my top five songs of all time.)

So get it if you haven't already, whether digital or physical.

* Note: I still haven't heard the new Sleigh Bells, Depreciation Guild, and a few other albums.  But it'd have to be quite an upset to topple This Is Happening.

Seen and Not Seen

It's been a while since I wrote anything more than 140 characters, and I'm starting to get the itch again.  I guess I technically have a journal elsewhere, but in a place that's hardly used any more and is now a pain to even visit due to all the ads.

I'm still not totally sure what I'm going to do with this thing.  The vague plan right now is to use it for talking about music, with occasional interludes for movies or something.  There's a chance I might use it for more creative elements or comedy, but I guess I could also split those off into some other separate location...on the off chance I actually do get fully bitten by that sort of writing bug.  But more likely it will just be mosquitos biting me.

I wanted to name this blog "Seen and Not Seen", but at least two different variations of that are already taken up by squatters who haven't posted anything.  Bastards!