Out Of Her Head She Sang

:: 05 ::

Foo Fighters
The Colour & The Shape

You Don't Know How Lucky You Are

:: 06 ::

The Beatles
The White Album

Half of the time we're gone but we don't know where...

#8 - Simon & Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water

If anyone on this list needs an explanation of how good this album is, you can email me. I don't expect my inbox to be filling up any time soon.

Favorites: Only Living Boy in New York, The Boxer, Baby Driver
Least Favorite: Bridge Over Troubled Water (ironic, no?)

In Memorium

Monday, 12 Mar 2007

Lead singer for rock band Boston found dead

WASHINGTON: Brad Delp, the lead singer of the 1970s and '80s rock band Boston was found dead at his home in southern New Hampshire on Friday, local police said.

Delp, 55, apparently was home alone and there was no indication of foul play, Atkinson, New Hampshire, police said.

With Delp's big, high-register voice, Boston scored hits with More Than a Feeling, Long Time, and Peace of Mind. The band's popularity peaked in the late 1970s, but it remained active off and on, producing its last album Corporate America in 2002.

Delp was born in Boston, and bought his first guitar at age 13 after seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, according to his website. Since 1994, he spent his spare time working in a tribute band called Beatle Juice, the band's website said.

The band's website carried a statement, "We've just lost the nicest guy in rock and roll."

Walk into the Wild...

#8 Harrod and Funck, Harrod and Funck.

The rest of the albums from here on out are virtually interchangeable. This has been one of my favorite albums since high school. A friend's older brother told us the story of how these guys would attract hundreds of people with their music on the sidewalks and subways of Boston. I saw these guys live at Calvin College and became an immediate fan. They are excellent musicians and great story tellers. My favorite songs on this album are Something, Walk Into the Wild, and the Lion Song (which my brother played for us at the rehearsal dinner before our wedding). I can't think of any songs on this album that I don't like. Unfortunately, they broke up in 1999 after only releasing 3 albums. Jason Harrod still makes music and has released a few albums lately (not nearly as good as the glory days) Check these guys out if you get a chance- http://www.harrodandfunck.com/

Bittersweet Symphony

#1 - Urban Hymns (The Verve) 1997

My favorite album containing my favorite song, Lucky Man. This album has always been, and will likely always be, #1.

Backwoods Bazan

Since many of you have a past/present with David Bazan of Pedro the Lion, I thought I would offer a link to an interview I did with him in the Fall that just now made it to virtual print.

Check it out here. Coming soon: My #3.

#3 - Many In High Places Are Not Well - HiM


Believe it or not, I used to hate jazz...and I didn't even know what Afro-beat was. This band taught me to embrace them both. Doug Scharin uses percussion to penetrate every aspect of this group. Whereas most drummers provide the beat and fill in the empty space, he is the foundation upon which everything else is built. He combines these genres to create a perfect balance in a lively yet sensual sound.

The first tracks I heard on this album were samples (which Papa downloaded) of Slow, Slow, Slow (Slow Dub Low version) and The Way Trees Are. I couldn't get enough of either song and eagerly anticipated this album's release. Papa and I picked it up at CD Alley and then went to Mellow Mushroom for dinner. I vividly remember sitting in the parking lot (I think it was before we ate) listening to these songs. Wow. Although they were slightly different from the downloaded versions that whet my appetite, hearing them in their entirety was incredibly satisfying.

It took me a while to warm up to the album as a whole. I think it was because I heard the best songs first. Then I got to a point where I wore it out. Any time I had control of the CD player, this is what I would pop in. Seeing them live with Mice Parade only added to my adoration. They made a dingy, smoke-filled bar feel like heaven on earth.

I don't know how I can put two more albums above this one. It feels more accurate to say that this is 1/3 of #1.

Peter and his monkey laugh, and I laugh with them

#5 Modest Mouse, The Lonesome Crowded West (Up, 1997)

The author Flannery O’Connor famously described the South as a place that is “Christ-haunted." Having lived in the South for coming up on seven years now, I’m here to tell you that Flannery O’Connor is full of shit. Forgive me if I misunderstand the rules of the undead, but for Christ to be able to haunt anything, wouldn’t he have to die first (again, I guess)? Believe me, Christ is far from dead in these parts. Saying that the South is haunted, to my mind, is essentially a way to say, “hey, every other person here is a Baptist, but we’re still cool and mysterious and gothic.”

Now, the South certainly does have more than enough myth and mystery to go around (listen to any album by the excellent Drive-By Truckers, for example). As The Lonesome Crowded West suggests, however, it’s much more accurate to say that the region that Jesus haunts is the wide wide American West. Unlike in the South, from the first years that my people first defiled the Indians’ holy grounds, the West has never taken well to the pieties and religions of its parents. And while j.c. certainly makes his presence known out there, this album envisions a tired-out deity who, in his very otherworldliness and flamboyance, blends in with the rest of the kooks. In Modest Mouse’s vision, God is a slob like one of us, but here the ‘us’ is a motley collection of angry cowboys, pornographers, grinning salesmen, get-rich schemers, and drunkard good-for-nothings.

Much like with The Moon and Antarctica, Modest Mouse creates on this record a coherent musical and thematic world, but what makes this record slightly better, in my opinion, is that this one is more comic. From the first track, “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine,” wherein we all share an Orange Julius in America’s future ghost towns, through the last song, “Styrofoam Boots/It’s All Nice,” where the Big Man saunters through St. Peter’s (and his monkey’s) playground, “lookin’ a bit like everyone I’ve ever seen/ he moves like crisco disco, breath 100% Listerine,” this record puts forth an insightfully silly (but not entirely unserious) view of this great country. And though it sounds like a Very Important and Thought-Provoking Idea to say that a place is “Christ-haunted,” if we have learned anything from Casper and Scooby Doo episodes, it’s that ghosts are funny. The West is ridiculous. Cowboy Dan and “Doin’ the Cockroach” are ridiculous. And in this landscape, our buddy the carpenter’s apprentice (who appears in “Jesus Christ Was an Only Child”) and his apostles (in the heart-rending “Bankrupt on Selling”) are no different.

It’s not all fun times and chuckles, of course. The flip side of the car-salesman deity is the absent deity. In “Styrofoam Boots” we also hear that “well I’ll be damned,/ you were right, no one’s running this whole thing,” and “God takes care of himself, and you of you.” When we have a God reduced to haunting these (literally?) godforsaken places, even drunken Cowboy Dan can take his potshots (“He fired his rifle in the sky/ said, ‘God if I have to die, you will have to die’”). This unlikeable cowboy is a perfect metaphor for the utopian individualism and staggering hubris of the myth of the West, in which each person writes their own history. Even more than Ms. O’Connor, Cowboy Dan and Modest Mouse too are full of shit. Unlike with the countless myths of the South, however, at least this one doesn’t take itself all that seriously.

Clap Your Hands Say Low

Any one else psyched about Drums and Guns coming out in March? Here's a taste courtesy of Sub Pop with three essentials: Mimi harmonies, handclaps, and backwards guitar.

Low - Breaker, from Drums and Guns

The Showdown

Here's a shameless plug for Elizabethton's own, The Showdown. My brother constantly talks about these guys and how good they are, but naturally because I'm the big brother, and obviously cooler and wiser, I never gave them the time of day until now.

http://www.myspace.com/theshowdown
I was very pleasantly surprised.

They also made the cover of HM magazine this month. Their new album released today, and they are going to be at Gatsby's in Johnson City tonight for a release show.

Maybe little brothers get some right from time to time.

"Now I'm drinking drinking drinking drinking coca coca cola"

#4 The Moon & Antartica, Modest Mouse, Epic Records, 2000

Though I'm guessing that Sean B might regale us with tales of that other Modest Mouse gem, The Moon & Antartica is the true opus for me. I got this record in Bristol right before Sarah and I moved to Durham and I don't think I stopped listening to it my entire first year at Duke. Or since, really. Scoffed by some as frontman Isaac Brock's sell-out album (read: first major label record), nothing could be farther from the truth. Instead of being methodical radio-pap, this record cuts a dark existential swath filled with movements from shoegaze to guitar panic and from punk spazz to acoustic balladry all within an unabashed self-transparency and lyrical truthfulness that opens the mental sinuses like a eucalyptus bath. I mean really, when I finish listening to this record it always feels like my mental state can breath again, freed from past baggage and future dirt (read: the stuff to which your body returns). For both Sarah and I, Brock, who also came from a kooky conservative Christian background, strikes a nerve with his honest, albeit blunt, theological observations. And the dynamic musical atmosphere doesn't hurt our love either. Rather than go on and on about each song, I thought I would post my Top 5 favorite lyrical moments from the record, along with links to the songs, so those who would like a taste can savor the flavor.

"The 3rd planet is sure that they're being watched by an eye in the sky that can't be stopped. When you get to the promised land, you're gonna shake that eye's hand." 3rd Planet

"I just got a message that said, "Yeah, hell has frozen over", got a phone call from the Lord saying "Hey boy, get a sweater. Right now." Tiny Cities Made of Ashes

"It's hard to remember we're alive for the first time. It's hard to remember we're alive for the last time." Lives

"It takes a long time but God dies too, but not before he'll stick it to you." I Came As a Rat

"And the one thing you taught me 'bout human beings was this - they ain't made of nothin' but water and shit." What People Are Made Of

Pick up your instrument and join in....

#9, Mountain Heart, No Other Way

I guess it took moving to Southwest Virginia to discover how much I liked bluegrass. This is the type of music that is born among good friends and a campfire. It makes you want to pick up an instrument and play along. I was first introduced to these guys two summers ago at a concert at a local fairground and have been a fan ever since. The band is composed of a fiddle, bass, mandolin, and guitar player, along with a banjo player with no fingers on his left hand that can flat out bring it. If you are looking to diversify your music library a bit, I would suggest checking these guys out. My favorite songs are On My Way Back to You, Mountain Heart and Bosman...

When your shortwave dies & there's no one to listen...

#9 - Vigilantes of Love, Audible Sigh
Those of you who know me have seen this coming for some time. Your only surprise may be that it isn't higher. My fanboy status for VOL may have declined over the past years, but this album abides as one of the true greats of the alt-country genre, and probably a snapshot of the band at its height. More talented as a poet than a musician, lead man Bill Mallonee crafted intense, literary lyrics that on this album finally got their due support from equally talented band members. Barn-burning rockers combine with quiet glimpses of hope and a raw brand of melancholy that few others can match. I still remember when I first heard this album: it was two weeks before I was getting married, I was living by myself in a tiny rented house on a farm in Bristol, Tennessee, and this came in the mail. Only problem: no stereo. I dug through still-unpacked boxes until I found my computer, dug it out, plugged in the crappy standard computer speakers and dropped the album in the CD-Rom slot. It sounded awesome.

Favorite tracks: She Walks on Roses, Extreme North of the Compass, Solar System (click for a listen)
Also available on Emusic: Check it.

I wanna be Bob Dylan....

#10, Counting Crows, August and Everything After

I do realize this is a repeat selection and may raise some eyebrows as a top-10 selection, but so be it.... It's one of the most worn CDs in my collection. The Crows are one of the first rock bands that I remember liking. Their debut into the rock music scence was at roughly the same time as mine as our paths crossed somewhere in the early 1990s. This is an album that I enjoy listening to without skipping any songs. My favorite songs on the album are Omaha, Raining in Baltimore and Rain King (especially the extra-raspy "yeaaaaaaaaah").

It feels nice to finally be in the single digits......

As the girls with pigtails were running from little boys wearing bowties their parents bought them

#6 Death Cab for Cutie, We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes (Barsuk, 2000)

Believe me, Julia and I viewed the scene in 2005 when we saw this band play Cameron Indoor Stadium (yes, really). We saw the braces and pimples. We saw the rapt crowd loft their open cell phones in the air and sing along to “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” So I am fully aware that the teenagers love their new pop heroes, Death Cab for Cutie. And that makes it odd, though no less true, to say that when We Have The Facts came out, it sounded improbably avant-garde to me. The reasonably opaque lyrics and inscrutable song titles that never actually appeared in the lyrics, the saturation of reverb, and the (what seemed to me to be) the glacial pace of half of the songs on the record – all of these things can probably be attributed to my musical naiveté, but I don’t think I was completely off-base. This album, I think above all their others, is the one that best stakes out a sound unique to this band. And it is the album that has, more than any other one in my top 25, created a fanboy. Before the Cameron show, I think I saw them play 5 or 6 times (R.I.P. Go! Studios in Carrboro, NC). Also, I will always hold a special place in my heart for the band that wrote the only song I know of that's (maybe) about being/loving a science grad student (“Scientist Studies”).

I can’t begrudge them their success at all – I think it’s well earned, and my opinion is that if teenagers are going to listen to something, let it be DCFC rather than something much worse. There is something sad, though, about seeing times change. I wore my DCFC t-shirt today as a sort of act of reclamation, but I have to admit I felt a little sheepish doing so. This isn’t meant to be an elegy – all of DCFC’s albums (and especially We Have the Facts) are in my more-or-less regular rotation, and upon re-evaluation, Plans, while still their weakest album, is much better than I gave it credit at first.

Finally, because there’s always time for a nutty idea, here’s my theory about DCFC’s career trajectory: On their next record, The Photo Album, Ben Gibbard sings this line, “and now we all know that the words were true in the sappiest songs.” This line, in 2001, was a brilliant insight.* It was a manifesto for trading in tired out 90s slacker irony for sincerity, and DCFC went about trying to enact this idea. But, when the results came out (a.k.a. Plans), old fans like me realized that maybe we kinda liked the irony more than we thought. On Plans, the songs are sincere, straightforward, heartfelt, and, well, a little too boring and sappy (or perhaps not the right kind of sappy – songs about summer flings and affected adolescent suicide pacts probably require some distance, but the best song on Plans “What Sarah Said” is effective because it is a sincere, blunt song about death, with a coda that repeats the line “So who’s gonna watch you die?” I think one must have a mind of winter not to think of misery while listening to this song).

*As the year 2001 suggests, I think there is also a political undertone here. Desire for the end of irony and for sincerity and trust was all well and good before our nation had lived through six years where we have been repeatedly told that 2+2=5 (or maybe better 2+2=tens of thousands of dead). A lot of things could be said here, but on a music blog let me keep it to: F*ck B*sh for taking away sincerity and for taking away my Death Cab.