San Diego Serenade

Guest blogging is fun. I’ve done it twice now. What I think is funny about the process is that it only a stranger or a more distant acquaintance would be willing to hand over the reins of their blog to me carte blanche, anybody who actually knows me would never trust me to do that.

The most recent person to put me in full on “God-it’s-so-difficult-not-to-post-lemon-party” mode is Ryan from Muzzle of Bees. He is canyoneering off in the wild west somewhere, so I get to write whatever I want on his blog while he’s gone. Which actually turned out pretty good I think. Check it out.

If you’re wondering why posting has been rather limited on here the past few weeks, there are all sorts of answers I could give you, but in all honesty, it’s probably been because I’ve been watching Road House over and over and over again. The 1989 Patrick Sawyze flick about a bouncer with a NYU degree in philosophy is the first movie for a new project we’ve been working on at work called RiffTrax, where Mike Nelson provides a MST3K style commentary (riffing) on a movie as a downloadable MP3. So you play the MP3 while you watch the movie, however you choose to do so. It’s a cool idea, even after watching Road House for the 12th time to see what synchs up and what doesn’t, (This has been a maddening ordeal, but if I ever get the call for Jeopardy and the categories turn out to be “The Double Deuce”, “Jasper, MO”, and “Whether Pain Hurts or it Don’t”, I’ll be set.) So check it out if you like either Road House or MST3K. More movies will be coming in future weeks. And here’s a little short that we made around the office:

And I’d expect a new Podcast tomorrow, as well as some pics from Tuesday nights Cat Dirt Records showcase with Fifty on Their Heels, MC Flow and Grand Ole Party, plus my thoughts on last nights Raconteurs show last night, later today.

http://www.rifftrax.com

In case you were worried that the talentless photoshop hacks responsible for photoshopping the weekly dose of No Limit Records cover art (including such gems as the above Mercedes- Rear End) back in the late 90s was out of work and destitute, I present to you evidence that they are still hard at work in the music industry in the form of the cover for Bob Dylan’s “Modern Times” due out at the end of August.

And, much more amazingly, in the “Check it yourself to make sure it’s true” department, No Limit Recording Artist Mercedes - Rear End is currently selling for between 35 and 60 dollars (!!!) on amazon.com. No joke. Check it out. There is no god.

This installment of the Friday Charts looks like it could just as easily have come from ten years ago. Half of the artists featured were at their peak over a decade ago, and evidently are still going strong. Some come as no surprise: Thom Yorke’s album could have been “Thom Sings the Gin Blossoms” and there still would have been rabid interest in it. Conversely, tons of people seem to have downloaded Busta Rhymes’ new album just to see if there is a track where Busta spends a couple minutes trying to cajole you into sending him some money a la The Herlihy Boy on SNL.

“Please send me five dollars…Everyone liked “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See”, right? Please let me sleep in your basement…”

Cut to Dr. Dre shrieking “Let Busta Rhymes sleep in your basement!”

Unfortunately Youtube has no video of that semi-obscure sketch, so we’ll move right on to the charts. Links go to the Hype Machine for each artists, where you can find a wide variety of album cuts, live tracks and rarities:

1. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium
2. Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
3. Thom Yorke - The Eraser
4. Keane - Under the Iron Sea
5. The Walkmen - A Hundred Miles Off
6. AFI - Decemberunderground
7. The Raconteurs - Broken Boy Soldiers
8. Busta Rhymes - The Big Bang
9. Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam
10. Tool - 10,000 Days

Muzzle of Bees runs an regular feature where Ryan sends a blogger a set of questions he came up with and publishes their responses. I was quite excited when he asked me to participate. Muzzle of Bees was one of the first blogs I learned about (Ryan is a friend of “Ennnnnnnnn” video actor Jake Feala), and I’m not embarassed to say that I had hoped I would someday be asked to list my longwinded opinions and theories for a captive audience. After sending Ryan I think 6 different emails yesterday, including the always embarassing “Here is the link I forgot to send to you” email without actually including the link, the segment is finally up. So go check out the Q & A session right here.

So in addition to his XM radio gig, Bob Dylan has a new album coming out later this year. Those in the know (not me) get to listen to it early next week.

Living in an era where Bob Dylan has only released good albums, studio and Bootleg Series, makes you think about the Not So Long Ago Times (not as catchy an album title) when a new Dylan album was far from anticipated, but a potentially mock-worthy event. I’m glad to have missed that era. Starting to listen to Dylan in the late 90s is like starting to date a model a few years after she used to be really fat and have braces and skin problems: bask in the hotness, ignore all that old stuff and pray it never surfaces again.

I’m heading up to Seattle tomorrow for a wacky Memorial Day weekend of border to border driving. One of the bonuses is getting to see friends in Oregon and San Francisco. The friends in Oregon we meet up with at a Beck and M. Ward concert, and based on that good fortune, I looked into the bands that were playing in Seattle and San Fran just to see if we might get lucky in two more cities.

And not only did we not get LUCKY, we got completely, 100% screwed, because the day after we have to leave Seattle in order to get home in a healthy, non-speed requiring manner, the Northwest Death Fest is playing at Fenix in Seattle. Seeing that such a festival is taking place, with such a wide variety of abominable band names is quite the curiosity provoking event.

The guy on the left from Sadus needs to work on his metal face

Check out this lineup:

Belt Fed Weapon
Bung
Ceremonial Castings
Damage Overdose
Deeds Of Flesh
Desolation
Disharmony
Doom Lit Sky
Embalmed
Embryonic Devourment
Fallen Angels
In Memoriam
Meatshits
Mummification
Near Life
Necrobiosis
Non Existence
Obituary
Passive Aggressive
Sadus
Scorched Earth
Severed Savior
Shitstorm
The New Plague
Try Redemption
Unsanctified
Vulganizer
Wake The Dead
Zuckuss

I have a few questions regarding death metal fests such as these:

1. How does this endless succession of blaring death metal not get old? Do people talk in the line for the bathroom saying “Wow, Deeds of Flesh was great, and Doom Lit Sky was even better, but believe me, Embryonic Devourment is going to blow them all out of the water.”

2. Are band names tossed out of the band name selection process? If so, what are the ones that are left on the chopping block in favor of ones like Meatshits and Shitstorm?

2a. If those two bands formed an Audioslave/Velvet Revolver type supergroup, would they even have to discuss whether to call the band MeatshitStorm?

3. If a normal looking guy like me wearing a tshirt without a prominent skull or corpse were to show up at this event, what would be the reaction? What is the death metal equivilent of a needle scratching across a record as the music suddenly stops?

4. As a parent, wouldn’t it be just infinitely more troubling to learn that your seemingly normal, A and B student is sneaking off to the Northwest Death Fest instead of going to play Wallyball at the rec center like they said they were than to find a bag of weed in your kids room and learn that occasionally they are getting high and listening to Dark Side of the Moon?

All these questions will unfortunately go unanswered. But as a final thought, everyone who writes about San Diego mentions how a bunch of people pegged it as “the next Seattle” during the mid 90’s. Maybe, just maybe, this prediction not coming true was not such a terrible thing.

Enjoy your Memorial Day.

Songs of Summer on Muzzle of Bees

Ryan over at Muzzle of Bees is doing a Songs of Summer feature, where he is soliciting opinions from music bloggers about their archetypical summer song. Would you believe that my summer song kicks off the series?

Just in case after reading my entry you wanted to hear the other three songs I mentioned as being contenders for the summer song throne, here are One Minute Man, Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby and Mr. Chin.

You can’t make stuff up like the comments a few entries below. For the past three weeks or so I emailed a few different people at the Street Scene, hoping to hear some tips on bands that were playing or maybe even get some tickets to give away to readers of this website. I didn’t hear anything until today when the design and media director of the Street Scene read my blog and called me “retarted” and “a joke” for suggesting that a Replacements reunion at the Street Scene might be an event worth getting excited about. I don’t imagine that this kind of confrontation happened before the rise of the internet, and I think that we’re all better for the chance to be randomly insulted by a grown man.

Intimate Secretary - Maybe my favorite song on the album (It’s better live)

Secondly, tickets for the Raconteurs July 19th show at Soma go on sale tomorrow at 10 AM…technically…They are also available right now at the Raconteurs presale site. You need a password to get in, but I’ll spare you the 10 seconds that took to obtain - it is “brokenboy”. Tickets are a slightly pricey meat-a ball, at $30 a pop, especially for an album that didn’t particularly distinguish itself the first couple of times you listen to it, but check out the ridiculous solos in the above video. I’m not one to doubt Jack White’s powers. Bad things happen to the last guy who did that.

Thirdly, I saw the above image on BoingBoing today. I’m not sure what it was specifically referencing, but it made me think about the recent lawsuit filed by the RIAA against XM radio. It’s broken down very well here, but basically the RIAA has decided to sue XM for making devices like the XM radio I have, that essentially act as Tivo’s for your radio, allowing you to record 5 hours of music. You can’t take the music off, you can’t give it to a friend, five hours is a pretty short amount of music to record, and it’s not CD quality. But that doesn’t stop the RIAA, whose next logical plan would have to be to seek out and sue all the widows of Gulf War veterans, just in case there are people out there who they haven’t alienated yet. It’s one thing when the poor guy who opens up the Authentic Kazakhstan Restaurant in Pacific Beach’s business fails, you kind of feel sorry for that poor guy. When its a bunch of dicks like the RIAA who seem completely unwilling to seize upon the advances and goodwill exhibted by the public towards the exciting future of music and music technology, there’s just no sympathy to be had. XM has a good rebuttal of their own right here, they come across as 100% pro consumer. I wonder what the RIAA’s message to their consumers would be…

Fourthly, we arrive at the Charts. Some major releases have been hapening lately. Let’s see what the ten most seeded albums are at a certain file sharing portal. Links go someplace with album samples, live bootlegs, crazy remixes, criticism, maybe ALL FOUR!

1. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium
2. Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
3. Sufjan Stevens - The Avalanche
4. Tool - 10,000 Days
5. Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam
6. The Walkmen - A Hundred Miles Off
7. The Streets - The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living
8. The Raconteurs - Broken Boy Soldiers
9. Neil Young - Living With War
10. Angels & Airwaves - We Don’t Need To Whisper

No real comments, many of these albums have been around for a while. What’s more interesting to me is what didn’t turn up on the list. Pitchfork has given out a few highly touted reviews lately, giving Shogun Kunitoki, Beirut and the Futureheads “recommended” status and Scott Walker and Danielson “Best New Music” status. These are usually enough to catapault something into the top ten, like has happened to Band of Horses, or Tapes ‘n Tapes. I don’t know if it necessarily signifies a decline in the influence of Pitchfork on peoples downloading habits, but it is interesting to note.

Finally, three of these bands are rumored to be playing the Street Scene, #s 2, 4 and 10. I didn’t even realize that Angels & Airwaves was a Blink 182 related project until I looked for MP3s to link to. I guess when you are retarded, you tend to be fuzzy on the details.

Within a month of starting this website, I got an email from a random Northern band. They wanted to know if I would like a copy of their album, ostensibly to check out and hopefully hype on the website. Well of course I wanted it. The novelty of a band wanting to send me their CD was pretty neat, and even if they didn’t come from San Diego, maybe I could learn about something new and bask in the shallow, thankless, reflective glory that is being the “first person” to tell you about a band.

Well, it turns out that I didn’t particularly like the CD. It wasn’t god awful, but it wasn’t something I was going to stick my neck out and talk about just because they sent me a CD. It actually arrived while I was visiting New York, so it had been sitting in the mailbox when I got home, along with an email from the band asking if I’d got it yet. I replied that I had, but had been out of town and was going to listen the first chance I got. Not having a job, this was not a problem. I listened a few times. Nothing struck me. But I got a few more emails, asking what I thought. Then one of the guys IM’d me. He told me that he’d read my review of “A Confederacy of Dunces” at amazon.com. I read a Confederacy of Dunces in 1999, my senior year in high school, and did not remember writing a brief review of it at Amazon.com

Needless to say, I did not respond. In fact, I think I made sure my windows were locked. Anyways, this is a textbook way to not get someone to write about your CD.

A good way to GET someone to write about your CD is to send them a really good CD. And someone did that to me just yesterday: Nathan Asher & The Infantry - Sex Without Love. The hype aroudn the album stresses that one of the songs had won two potentially made up songwriting competitions that I had never heard of. Having Won numerous blog competitions myself, most notably the Conor Lastowka Blog Writing Award, and the My Cat’s Butt Invitational, this did not impress me. But the quality of the song “Thursday Night/Friday Morning” (not the award winner) did. It’s the album closer, and builds from a quiet song mainly featuring the singers Oberst-like wavery vocals (a good thing), into a great drum and key heavy fake-ending-climax-then-reprise, which, as we all know, is the only proper way to end an album.

It would be foolish to base an album recommendation just that one song, (see Spacehog - In The Meantime), so don’t just take my word for it. Kwaya Na Kisser recommends the album as well, and has a few more MP3s for you to check out. I think that any band that has it together enough to pull off the album closer they do is worth giving a chance to the rest of their material. So if you want, check out the CD at CDBaby.

And seriously, check out A Confederacy Of Dunces. I stand by that recommendation from my 18 year old self.