Murphy's Earbuds

(fyi: that is one of my fave quotes from "Sassafras Roots" from Green Day's album Dookie - one of my absolute faves in high school. yeah, I know it was one of yours too. Go ahead and give it a spin)

It's election day. I am at school. The kids are not. I am attempting to do grades. I am trying not to waste time. It's not going well. Here's what I have listened to today:


Deerhoof, Apple O'
R.E.M., Green
Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass
Wilco, Sky Blue Sky

I will try to update this soundtrack to my procrastination as the day goes on.

...and i guess that's the great thing about the blogosphere: so long as you don't click through, you will be forced to read whatever I write. But that quote also comes right out of track five from the "album of the day", if you will, R.E.M.'s Green.

I never cared much for the video for "Stand." Sure, it spawned a cute, yet ill-fated, dance craze, but seriously?, the video was lame and painted a less than stellar portrait of this Athens, GA early-college-radio archetype. As an eleven or twelve year old Guns n' Roses fan, I had no preexisting pretentions or knowledge of R.E.M.'s modest and hip, underground roots. For all i knew, they were the "next big thing." It's funny to look back at these facts in light of the following:

a) if a band with such indie roots as Michael Stipe and the boys were to make such OBVIOUS stabs at mainstream popularity as the video for "Stand" and opening their album with "Pop Song 89" (however tongue-in-cheek it may have been) amidst my current pretensions about pop-culture crossover, I would have immediately and, most likely, permanently written them off as poseurs.

b) I would not have been alone in my snotty casting-off as many early R.E.M. fans saw this album as a final nail in the indie coffin they started crawling into on their album previous.

Whether R.E.M. made a conscious grab for acceptance or if the general public of listeners just caught up to them would be an EXCELLENT topic for another post here, but it's merely an interesting sidebar to this discussion of 1988's Green. Moving on...

In addition to "Stand" getting considerable airplay on MTV, many of the songs from this album were featured in an episode of 21 Jump Street, one of my favourite shows at the time. I don't remember the full plot of the episode (and am waaay too lazy to search tvtome or imdb for it), but I know there was some skiing. In a weird way, this use music from an indie band on the cusp of popular appeal as the soundtrack for a TV show clearly-aimed at the teen demographic predated what is now being hailed as a creative way for bands to get discovered, see "Tree Hill, One" or "O.C., The". In reality, TV's "recent" predilection for using "up and coming" artists as the soundtrack to their shows is really just boob-toob producers shilling for the big boss now in control of both the TV network AND the record company which is putting out (and pushing) the new James Blunt (or whothefuckever) record featured in said TV show.

y'know what... I think I am harboring some strange bitterness about something right now, 'cos I really did not intend this as a rant of any kind. Hmm. Let's just pretend the first part of this never happened so I can quickly move on and say what I want to say.

R.E.M.'s Green was my first situational album - the first record I ever owned that fit a certain mood or season or type of weather. Much like my last post about The Trials of Van Occupanther, there is a time and place for this album: the soggy day. Not to be confused with rainy, there are some days that are grey and wet without the precipitation ever really amounting to anything. They seem to happen mostly in fall. They start out ugly and end the same, and I don't feel like doing a damn thing when I wake up and see one. At some point after getting this album, I listened to it on a day like this and it all made sense. The colors were clearer. The lyrics were stronger. The guitars and mandolins and drums sat right in my lap and it sounded like Michael Stipe was whispering in my ear. "Stand", "Pop Song 89", and "Get Up" break the mood a bit before the record really settles, but by the time you hit track five, you can't help but be entranced. I remember as soon as a I experienced this I ran to share it with my then-music buddy, Jeff Soehnel (I wonder where that dude is now). He thought me a weirdo at the time, but he tried on the first soggy day available, and then told me it had changed his life - heavy shit for seventh grader. I wonder if my seventh graders do this sorta thing? I think you should give it a spin before the sun comes out today - or it starts raining.


p.s. - in Paste Magazine's recent "Fave R.E.M. Album" poll, Green was tied for dead last. : (

Midlake
The Trials of Van Occupanther

This album is fall. Unfortunately, I hadn't yet laid my grubby paws on it until the tail end of last year. Colored leaves had long since given way to bare branches and sinus infections. Luckily, a faint memory of this record crept up on me yesterday afternoon as I headed to the train to meet Stacey (also a big fan) in the city. It was as if the temperature and wind were whispering me a reminder about what was my favourite release of 2006.

I understand that, in the subjective sense, there was no debating TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain's reign as BEST album of the year, but, despite it's greatness, it didn't capture my heart like this Midlake album. Maybe it's the production (drums so muted they make Mick Fleetwood sound like Neil Peart and guitar tones reminiscent of Neil Young and the Guess Who). Maybe it's the breezy voices or the pastoral lyrics they deliver. Maybe it's because it recaptures all the greatest things about the music of the 1970's (think Seals & Crofts, America, Bread) without and overt sense of pretense. Some amalgam of these is the basic equation for this, or any, album's success, but this Denton, TX (shout out to Jay and the rest of UNT) band's ability to create beautiful moments out of relatively simple melodic and/or harmonic gestures is what separates it from the pack. Their "antique" lyrics aid in the overarching effect of being in another time and place when you listen to this record. Here are some choice lines from "Roscoe", the first cut off the record:

Stonecutters made them from stones chosen specially for you and I, who will live inside.
The mountaineers gathered tender piled high in which to take along.
Driving many miles, knowing they'd get here...

---

The village used to be all one really needs.
That's filled with hundreds and hundreds of chemicals that mostly surround you.
You wish to flee but it's not like you, so listen to me...

---

Whenever I was a child I wondered what if my name had changed into something more
productive like Roscoe.
Been born in 1891, waiting with my Aunt Rosaline.


I recognize that outside of any musical context these lyrics come off as something of an affectation, but, rest assured, the music (haunting, driving, Neil Youngish) only makes you believe more in the narrator's paean to a simpler time long-forgotten. This theme carries the band through the majority of the record. Between the hard work of the aforementioned artisans and the occasional excursion into the forest ("Did you ever want to be overrun by bandits; to hand over all of your things and start over new?"), it may seem The Trials of Van Occupanther could play out as one giant period send-up; but there are plenty of gentle and sentimental moments, complete with flute obligato to keep you wrapped up in Midlake's spell. From the stillness of the title track to the plaintive tones of a spurned, but earnest and redemptive, lover in "Branches", this album covers a lot of emotional ground, often supported by stunning harmonies and tasteful fills.

Just to make sure I wasn't too wrapped up in memories to look at this disc clearly, I pulled it up on the 'ol iPod in the midst of Staten Island traffic this afternoon. Not even the monotony of the stop and go of the shittiest boro could get in the way of the magic weaved by Midlake's The Trials of Van Occupanther. I sat there, almost oblivious to the lurching sea of Camry's and SUV's, just smiling, singing along, and occasionally mothing the word "wow" at every gorgeous autumn moment I heard.

i know i know i know.

new radiohead!!! new bruce springsteen!!! new mike birbiglia!!! years worth of shit i haven't written about!!! if i can find the time...

I am fucking furious. I just worked for 45 minutes in this fucking blog editor window on a post
about the new System of a Down record and the "oh so stable" Firefox froze up on me. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I should have saved it as I went, BUT I DIDN'T. So in light of my having a day off, I will be lazy and just give you a list of what's new in my iTunes library and whether or not I like it.


System of a Down, Mezmerize, 2005. f'in love it, tied for best of the lot.
Sleater-Kinney, The Woods, 2005. f'in love it, not only tied for best, but my fave S-K album.
Mos Def, The New Danger, 2004. mediocre at best, MAJOR disappointment.
Spoon, Gimme Fiction, 2005. like it, still getting into it.
M.I.A., Arular, "2005". love it in the club, like it in the car, amuse people with it on the couch.
Chris Mills, untitled, not yet released. like it.
Of Montreal, The Sunlandic Twins, 2005 . like it, a bit over the top, growing on me.
The GO! Team, Thunder Lightning Strike, 2004/5, love it. big fun.


more later.

...so we'll try this again. Nearly a year has passed since my last post. I have listened to countless numbers of albums, singles, demos, shows, etc. I have revelled in new releases and re-discovered classics and personal all-time faves, and how many posts do I have to show for it? zero. That's right - zip.


Needless to say, I have not been lazy. I have continued to rehearse, record, and perform with two of the greates bands in NYC. I have continued to attempt to inspire and educate the youth of Bushwick. I launched a new website. Long in short, I just plum forgot about this thing.


But worry not, faithful readers. I am back from the dead; and as the summer music scene heats up, this will be THE PLACE to find out what I am listening to, where you can come see me and other great acts play live, and maybe even get a few tips on what should be traveling through your earbuds.


In addition to regularly posting again, I am going to try to include (in the sidebar) a list of upcoming shows worth checking out. If you know of any, please feel free to comment on the post or email me. I will also, if you don't mind (and please let me know if you do), make this a more general media blog. While I understand that "just because it happened to [me] doesn't make it important", I figure that if you're here you'll care enough to read and comment. so here we go...

Yesterday's trip to Jersey:

Post-Punk Madness...
Gang of Four, Entertainment
Joy Division, Closer

Ah, NJTransit. Off the family barbecue. What better way to pass the time than to listen to some mind-numbinly disaffected and repetitive music.

**** Ok, now it's July 6th and I have mysteriously lost three or four posts I was in the middle of, so I guess I will recap some stuff.****

As per the beginning of this post: I have since listened to not only a lot of the aforementioned British Post-Punk acts, but they're biggest fans as well. I must admit that this new dance/rock thing is startting to excite me. As much as it kills me to here Franz Ferdinand on K-Rock (that concert rules, btw. I literally sweat of 5 lbs. of water weight and danced so hard I was ready to pass out/throw up), it makes me glad to see that bands like !!! and The Killers (both of which I just purchased from the iTunes store) are showing up not only in The A.V. Club, but on the pages of Rolling Stone as well. While I doubt I will spend much time listening to !!! (pronounced "chk chk chk", btw) for the sake of listening, they, along with these other new groups, have inspired me to think about DJ'ing for the first time in my life. Their album is choc full o' profanity and politcal rant, but it never detracts from the indie-cum-new wave-cum-electronica-cum-post-punk-cum-club music of it all. The Killers, on the other hand, are lighter, and, in many ways, more interesting fare. I guess Duran Duran with the slightest hint of pop-punk melodrama is how I would best describe these guys. I almost got in a car wreck laughing at how retro some of it sounded. The thing that sets it apart from the !!!'s, Franz Ferdinands, and Raptures of the world, however, is that amongst the big synth lines and 80's grooves, these guys are still all about songs. Y'know: verses, choruses, harmony... that sorta thing. I am a sucker for a great song, so I am guessing I will be spending a good deal of time with these guys. That my girlfriend really seems to like it only provides more opportunity for me to play this disc to death.

in other news...

NEW OBSESSION ALERT: Neil Young... more on that later.

This Past Week:

First off, allow me to apologize to my five readers. It's not that I haven't been listening at all, just not listening intently. See, I have been spending time playing shows and rehearsing, and not much time paying attention to the music I am hearing. I have also spent a large portion of my train/couch time reading. It's a habit I attend to in sprees; and I certainly feel one coming on. Based on the interest I showed in the upcoming Will Smith flicker, I, Robot (based on a novel by Isaac Asimov), my girlfriend reccomended that I read said author's most well known book(s), the Foundation trilogy. Go ahead, hardcore readers, laugh it up. I know I should have read this shit years ago, but I am finally getting to it now, and I LOVE IT! anyhoo... I finally paid attention to the earbuds this morning and it goes a li'l somethin like this - HIT IT!

Morning Commute:

Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand

It's taken some time to work up to this post, as I have been completely taken by and smitten with this album. Despite the fact that I was attracted to the cover art and the reviews I had heard, I refused its purchase at first, writing it off as nothing more than hipster fodder. The fact that one person described it as "The Strokes meet Disco" sealed the deal and I avoided it for a solid month. It wasn't until my bass player mentioned that getting people to dance was one of his motives for playing the music we do that I decided the idea of a dance band with real instruments was worth giving a spin - literally. Upon my next trip to the Prex, I was pleased to find it on vinyl and scooped it up having scarcely more than forty five seconds worth of previews at the iTunes store. I took it home and fell in love. Not only was i confronted with a band that were great players, but they were great songwriters AND made me want to dance. And dance I did. When I say the only time the record was removed from my turntable was to flip sides for more than a week, I am not exaggerating. I listened to it time and time and time again until the grooved were lodged into and impenetrable part of my brain. Withing two days of imapteience and unwillingness to deal with the Vinyl to MP3 process, I purchased it again, this time from the iTunes store. It seems that jagged, angular, dueling guitar work has become one of the staples of the new post-punk movement. I have found this return to a better aesthetic sense about the use of the guitar in rock music to be one of the redeeming values and saving graces of this otherise "smarter than thou" scene. The mere fact that said instrumental intelligence is one of the strongsuits of this record should sell me enough, but backed with a disco groove (yes, I said disco), the art for art's sake-ness of this popular effect is completely removed. It's just plain fun. The lazy vocals and slightly lo-fi recoding quality could be misconstrued as Strokes-influenced, but it only makes this dance record sound more organic. If you read about this band's roots (esentially throwing their own dance parties in what seems to be Scotland's answer to Williamsburg), this straight-forward approach to studio sound makes all the more sense. The lyrics border on the ridiculous at times, but most times the stock lyrics ("this fire is out of control, gonna burn this city) only serve to add to the fun of the album. "Dark of the Matinee" certainly stands out as my fave, and has been chosen as their third single. If you buy one record before you finish reading this blog, let it be Franz Ferdinand.

On to the bad stuff. My worst fears are coming true. For some godforsaken reason, the mainstream has caught on to this band. How they are getting airplay on K Rock is beyond me, but it's happening nonetheless. I have been planning on going to see their upcoming show in Brooklyn for a month and a half now. For weeks, the venue's ticket site has been saying "day of show only", and yet: they tickets are now "sold out" and going for as much as $120 a pair on cragislist. *sigh* but wait! the same said bassist who, in the first paragraph, inspired me to buy this record went to see them at Virgin Megastore *blech* last night and SCORED ME A TICKET!!!! now i just need to hope and pray it's not counterfeit. My only real fear is the Williamsburg hipsters in their striped sweaters and trucker hats nodding their approval in the front row, whilst they SHOULD be getting their groove on. I know I will be (getting my groove on that is).

Driving to/from JFK:

D12, "My Band"

So my roommate and I were driving out to the airport to pick up his girlfriend. We were doing our best impersonations of the children we teach, so we inevitably turned to Hot 97 on the radio and began bopping. We were smack dab in the middle of "My Band". I must admit, I found this song catchy from the start; and after I read the Rolling Stone article about them from a few weeks ago, I realized that it was a neccesity to learn more about this group. I was very excited to find out that aside from being the best rapper alive, Eminem is also a good friend. For those of you not in the know, D12 existed years before Mr. Mathers's fame and fortune and it was gernerally agreed during that time that the first member of the group to "make it" would bring the others up with him. Well, with three incredible and eleventeen-platinum albums under his belt (and a budding flim career to boot), he has done just that: helping to record and release his old "band"'s debut (?) album. Anyhoo, we were rocking out to this song and suddenly became obsessed with finding it on the radio. We flipped from station to station, hoping that at least ONE would be playing - but to no avail. We sang the chorus of "My Band" to all the other songs on the radio, but it just wasn't as satisying. Long story short: I got home and downloaded it immediately. I am sure I will buy the album by week's end. I will let you know if I ever stop singing along.