onotob

Vol 001, Vol 002

It’s that time again folks. It’s time for me to put a bunch of cool new music in a neat little package to be divided up, hashed and sent to your eager clients to be reassembled and enjoyed. Truly, the sweetness of life.

Last time I sent a bit too much of this so-called cool new music and some of you felt (understandably) overwhelmed. In response to all the valuable criticism I received (you can stop with the criticism now, for real) I decided to limit myself to 5 albums per release. This turned out to be much more difficult than I originally anticipated, as I found myself reshuffling the line up time and time again. Something would sit on the list for a couple of weeks and then BAM!, something like Animal Collective comes along and fucks it all up (by being so awesome).

And so, after much deliberation, we arrive at the list presented here today. I think it’s a good mix of material that will challenge you as a listener, and some that will immediately grab hold of you and cause one of those involuntary smiles that fill our hearts with joy.

Remember, if it feels like a lot just listen to the highlights and delete what doesn’t interest you right away. And now, on to the show.

Animal Collective – Sung Tongs
Animal Collective is, as the name suggests, an umbrella name that covers a fluctuating cast, with Avey Tare and Panda Bear at the core. Their bio on the Fat Cat Records web site claims they came together “with the intention of moving pop music in a direction that would place heavy emphasis on sonic experience”, and boy howdy do they ever. The album opener Leaf House is the bait, the carrot on the stick, that gets you through this entire album. It is simultaneously catchy and experimental, with its cascading vocal harmonies and rhythmic core. This leads us to Who Could Win a Rabbit, which can barely contain its exuberance. It’s so much fun that it doesn’t have to make sense. Now that we’re hooked, we move easily through the next few songs, which range from the mellow acoustic plucking of The Softest Voice to the Latin-flavored childishness of Sweet Road. After this short little ditty we find ourselves at the crossroads. Visiting Friends marks a descent into madness, where all pretense is lost and there ain’t a hook in sight. For the rest of the album we’re falling down the rabbit hole, a strange and pretty musical space that rewards multiple listens and a sense of humor. Highlights: Leaf House, Who Could Win a Rabbit, Winter’s Love.

The Faint – Wet From Birth
A couple of albums ago The Faint were just another 80’s retro act out of Omaha, albeit one with some flare and creativity. With Wet From Birth they’ve created the perfect balance of looking back and moving forward, all while managing to make songs that move hips. The album is consistently strong, from the silky snub of How Could I Forget to the dirty synth sprint of Paranoiattack to the vulnerability of Phone Call. Highlights: Desperate Guys, How Could I Forget, Symptom Finger

Feist – Let it Die
I promised myself I wouldn’t over-hype this album because I want as many people to be able to enjoy it as possible, and nothing spoils a good thing more than overestimating it. So how best to describe this album? What affect did it have on me? I guess one could say that it unfurled in my heart like a thousand-petaled lotus, and by the time I was done listening I felt that I had fallen in love and had my heart broken and come to terms with it in the course of 45 minutes. Leslie Feist’s voice is sublime, and her songwriting is earnest, inventive and beautiful (the coy reversal of the title track is a perfect example). She is comfortable in any genre, and the album happily skips from folk to disco to pop to lounge. This has to be my top album of 2004, and I don’t even make top-10 lists. The only downside is that about half of the albums is comprised of covers. Beautiful though they be, I wish there was more original material to enjoy. I’m reticent to select highlights because they’re all so consistently great that I would hate for you to skip over any of them. Just sit down and listen to tracks 1 through 9. You won’t regret it.

Nellie McKay – Get Away From Me
Nellie McKay was 19 years old when she recorded this album. She can’t be more than 21 now. This little fact blows my mind every time I listen to her debut. The album is equally the product of a musical prodigy and a precocious teenager. But we forgive the vagaries of youth, do we not? We can only hope. The topics range from stalking prospective lovers to drinking to dealing with the death of a cat (which leads to drinking). There’s even a rap song in there. The lyrics are just smart enough (she apologizes for the stupid way she rhymes. It’s meta!), and the production literate enough, to overcome the sound of a young white female jazz vocalist rapping. There’s a lot to love here (it doesn’t get much better than Ding Dong), and her potential is limitless. Highlights: David, Ding Dong, The Dog Song.

Phoenix – Alphabetical
The Frenchmen of Phoenix have produced some of the best pop music ever with their sophomore effort Alphabetical. It’s got everything: crisp production, vaguely sentimental lyrics, vocal harmonies. There’s not to much to dislike, and at just under 38 minutes it’s also rather difficult to get bored. The songs just breeze along and before you know it you’re shaking what your mama gave you to Holdin’ On Together (Maybe you can tell me what “He told me a height could smile / if it’s filled with tears” means.) This often gets me through gridlock traffic with a smile. Highlights: Everything Is Everything, (You Can’t Blame It On) Anybody, Holdin’ On Together.

Posted at 4:18 pm.
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Friday night I had the pleasure of watching The Arcade Fire perform live at Emo’s in Austin. While I was falling in love with their album Funeral last year I made the obligatory web crawl to find out about live dates. This was during the first leg of their Funeral tour, so dates were few and in a radius of their native Montreal. I wrote an email to the contact address listed on their web site begging them to come to Austin. Someone wrote back to tell me that they were responding to all the recent attention the band was getting by extending the tour, and that they were definetely going to be coming through the southwest in early 2005. Satisfied for the time being, I settled back into absorbing and proselytizing the album and waited.

Last week, after reading an article about a Christmas EP the band put out a few years ago and watching a clip of their live show I decided to check up on their tour. Low and behold, Austin, TX on Friday January 21, 2005 at Emo’s. The mailing list had been completely silent, but my keen spider senses kicked in and saved the day. Tickets were purchased, and I began my campaign of bugging Jon every day to do the same.

So it could be said that I was excited when we (finally) made it to Emo’s. We had to wait in line for a while to pick up our tickets at will-call (the show was sold out), but before long we were inside and anxiously waiting. In the time it took to grab a few beers and locate a reasonable spot to watch the band had taken the stage to cries of jubilation from the crowd. I love attending shows like this one because you can be sure that almost every single person in attendance is there because they love the music, and not because it was just something to do in Austin on a Friday.

They opened with “Wake Up”, a real crowd pleaser, but it was pretty quiet. The dance club next door was overpowering the PA at Emo’s and would become quite a distraction as the evening progressed.

By the time they started the second song, “Neighborhood #2 (Laika)”, I was completely oblivious to any deficiencies in the environment around me. It is only in retrospect that I am able to pick out problems with the experience. During the performance I was lost, completely enthralled by the Canadian sextet before me, playing their hearts out and dragging us all into their world of love and loss and longing.

It’s hard to explain the show without getting down to its emotional core. For example, I always knew “Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)” was a mournful tale of love, death and unfulfilled expectations, but their performance of it added a sanctity that I hadn’t detected before. While the slightest brushings of violin floated over Win Butler’s guitar, Régine Chassagne gazed at the audience through a triangle made of two xylophone mallets and a drumstick. The sound of the club next door was invading and everyone on stage except for Régine had their eyes closed, concentrating. Régine looked worried, and she kept looking at Win in a concerned way (they are married), as if she knew how important this song was to him and was afraid that this place wasn’t sacred enough for it. I felt myself entering the circle with them, trying to push out the distractions and connect with what was being built, to add my own strength to theirs so that they could fully realize not just the composition, but the palpable energy that was accompanying it. When the song finally kicked off, I felt a wave of relief and satisfaction and a new appreciation for this understated song.

It’s always difficult to convey any experience in a satisfactory way, but thanks to The Miracle of the Internet you can listen to this show as if you were in the audience. Concert tape trading has fully embraced technology to speed it along, and the online communities involved in the creation and distribution of these recording are extremely active. The Traders Den allows anyone to sign up and start sharing, and one trader posted an audience recording of this show. The sound is much fuller than I remembered, and I now wish I had tried harder to get a better spot in the crowd.

So, the moral of the story is listen to The Arcade Fire. If they don’t succumb to The Curse of the Strong Debut they will go on to do great things. You can pick up their CD over at Merge Records.

Posted at 3:27 pm.
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Gamespot recently posted their most anticipated games of 2005, a multi-part writeup from a handful of their editors. I love these kinds of lists as they help me filter through large amounts of information allowing me to focus only on those things worthy of my precious time. So far, 2005 looks to be a stellar year for games.

I have one problem with this article, however. Gamespot is an excellent game resource, full of useful previews, videos, screenshots and news. A lot of hard work is put into collecting and presenting all of this information. Why, then, are there no links to the game spaces of the recommended games? The article brims with excitement, but you have to search for further details about the games in question yourself. Links, people. Welcome to the new Internets.

In other news, I finally broke down and purchased one of those nifty and oh-so-slim Playstation 2 consoles. It is, how you say, sexy. I was finally driven to this purchase (after many a year of console-free living) by a game called Katamari Damacy, which translates into “Pure Joy Translated Into Light, With Rainbows And Music”, or something.

Here’s how the story goes: the King of all Cosmos got ripped one night and when he woke up he found that he had misplaced all the stars in the sky. Having no recollection of the previous evening’s escapades, he decides to attack the problem from another direction: he sends his son, the pure-hearted Prince (“you”) to earth with a Katamari, which is some kind of knobbed, multicolored ball which can pick up any object of appropriate size. Your job is repopulate the night sky by picking up objects on earth with your Katamari until it is large enough to be tossed into space and become a star.

In the beginning you can only pick up thumbtacks and erasers and whatnot, but as your ball of junk gets bigger it can pick up larger and larger objects. As the Katamari grows the camera zooms out and the level scales to give you some perspective. In the later levels you end up picking up buildings, airports, oil tankers, islands and even giant octopi.

And the soundtrack! It ranges from classic video game techno to smarmy lounge jazz (“I want to roll you up into my life!”), to satisfying J-pop. All this for $20.

Oh, and a sequel is scheduled for release later this year. Now you can pick up anything!

Posted at 6:41 pm.
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Alex Ross has posted his New Yorker profile of Björk in its entirety. My favorite music writer writing about one of my favorite musicians. Beautiful.

Posted at 5:20 pm.
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I live in Texas. Texas often gets a bad rap, and I try not to take it too personally because I really don’t identify with the state. I like to think of myself as an example that the whole state isn’t bad, that there are pockets of intellect and reason that just need to be sought out.

And then we go and spend federal anti-terrorism funding on lawn mower racing.

[via]

Posted at 10:34 am.
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In order to break the long dry spell which has been haunting this web site (and to appease the three people who actually come here on a regular basis and say “what’s the deal?” when I see them at work) I’ll write one long post about all the things which have happened in my life, which I meant to write about at the time, but just didn’t, and not in chronological order. I really should write about this stuff as it happens, because the details are failing me.

I went up to Austin with my sister and my friends Catherine and Tommy to see Rilo Kiley play. My pal Jon felt a bit torn (as did I) because Del the Funky Homosapien was playing that night in San Antonio, practically within walking distance of his house. Jon went to Del, I went to Rilo. In the end, we were both rocked to our core.

Rilo Kiley was playing at a venue called Emo’s, one of hundreds of little bars in Austin which cater to live music. There were six, count ‘em six, other bands playing that night, of which I can only remember The Elected (a side project of Rilo) and The Fiery Furnaces. I can remember them because I saw them, as the other bands played on the inside stage and I didn’t dare leave the vicinity of the outside stage, for I desired a certain proximity to Rilo when they came out.

The Elected were a bit of a surprise. Another band was billed to play that slot but they got the chance to tour with REM, so Blake Sennet got the members of The Elected together and put on a show. It was apparent they didn’t have much time to prepare, but being the talented bunch they are (Mike Bloom plays keyboards, lap steel guitar, harmonica and sings) they managed to play a great show. Probably not making any converts, but preaching to the choir just fine.

When it finally came time for Rilo to play the outside area was packed. The energy of the crowd was intense. Rilo is a vigorous Alt-Country Indie Rock band, and we were ready to rock.

After their first song it began to rain. We’re talking Great Flood here. The stage and main crowd area were covered by a tin roof and the sound of the rain was impressive. Feeling the intensity of the band, the crowd and the rain flowing through me I felt that the world was born anew that night, there in our modern ritual space. It was amazing and, of course, difficult to articulate. Walking through downtown Austin in the pouring rain after the show just heightened the experience. There was almost no where you could go to be out of the rain, and so everyone just walked right through it. Clubs opened their doors and people danced in the streets, splashing in the giant puddles and grinning. I felt alive.

On another night I saw Ratatat and Mouse on Mars at The Parish with a few friends from work. Another mind-blowing experience, a chance to dance as hard as you can for 3 hours, the smile never leaving your lips. Ask me about Scarf Boy some time.

More recently we saw Lyrics Born and RJD2 at The Parish. RJD2 played a 4-table set and the Reverend Lyrics Born threw it down. The man knows how to work a crowd. I have never yelled as loudly for as long as I did during his set. There’s something magical about shouting “Don’t worry ‘bout the president, he can’t stop us now” along with Joyo Velarde, who is standing about 6 feet away because the venue is little more than a bar in a mid-sized room with hardwood floors.

And other than the music? Well, tons of stuff. New years was a blast, including a show by Mingo Fishtrap (more music!) and dancing with two women at once (see kids, shaking your ass on the dance floor can really pay off).

The new year looks promising and will probably be filled with crap to write about. Now if only I’d sit down and do it, eh?

Posted at 11:32 pm.
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