Background Noise

I’m listening to Smash Mouth’s perennial classic, Astro Lounge on much nicer speakers than I ever had when I was twelve and really listened to it, and I just noticed that on the classic megahit “All Star,” there’s some pretty nice funky bass and drum rhythms going on. It’s pretty cool. You can hear it on the video if you’ve got some bass to work with. The drummer and bassist are really working well together in that sort of pop setting.

I was also driving around yesterday with Miley Cyrus’ “Party In The U.S.A.” playing on the radio, which is a current megahit that hopefully no one ever refers to as a classic megahit even with tongue in cheek. Anyway, I noticed that right around the beginning of the chorus there’s some weird synth or heavily modified guitar parts going on that are interesting. I can’t really identify chord progressions by ear or anything, but it sounds kind of unusual, and the tone is really out of place in that style of song, although they sneak it in well. Kind of like in the chorus of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” (pay attention to the “If you like it, then you should have put a ring on it” part), which is brought out fantastically in this adorable cover. Actually, they also did this (and by ‘they’ I’m referring to the producers who don’t care whose song they are producing) to Kelly Clarkson’s hit from a few years ago, “Behind These Hazel Eyes.” In the chorus of that one, the drums are way too aggressive and there’s far too much distortion for the style of the song. Especially the bridge: That “chugga chugga” guitar is right out of grunge, and that’s just a girl’s pop song. The last chorus has some drum fills that are particularly out of line. I guess it worked out though, because it was really popular for a while.

Education Connexion

So this is a stupid thing to come write a post for, especially since I’ve been meaning for weeks to write an in-depth review of Monsters of Folk… but oh well. There’s this awful commercial on TV all the time, with this incredibly bad song, and the girl singing it on TV is pretty clearly lip-syncing to a song she didn’t sing, and it’s just all tragic, until at about 0:43 in that video, a weird extra track is added to the beat. It turns the whole sound of the thing upside down, taking it from its firm footing in amelodic TV jingle land into a creepy robotic electronic song. I mean, no, it doesn’t at all, but it makes the last 10 seconds of the commercial listenable.

 

That is all.

Travelling, swallowing Dramamine

I just bought Modest Mouse’s This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About. I’m unimpressed so far, but I like how some of it sounds.  It’ll probably grow on me over time, as other Modest Mouse records have tended to do.

The guitar timbre is awesome more or less throughout.

Rockin’ the Suburbs

I just bought Rockin’ The Suburbs by Ben Folds. I really like how it sounds, but I’m not sure he has anything valuable to say. He’s a damn good songwriter, though, even if he isn’t particularly insightful. “Gone” could be a Buddy Holly song.

People with pianos like slow songs too much, though.

Rock

Recently I’ve been in the mood for rock songs. Not hard rock (although that’s a poorly defined boundary), not heavy metal, not indie rock, not folk rock, not singer songwriter, not alternative rock, not rock n roll. Rock.

The problem is, rock is such a bland genre, to the extent that it counts as a well-defined genre to begin with, that for a rock song to be interesting it has to be very well composed. Hard rock songs are interesting because they’re angry, heavy metal is interesting because it’s fast and excessive, indie rock is interesting because it’s unusual, singer songwriters are interesting because they write good lyrics, Dragon Force are interesting because of their virtuousity, etc. Rock has none of that: it has to be interesting on its own musical merits, which makes it difficult.

I also reject bands such as Jet and AC/DC and Led Zeppelin that are Rock bands but practice, instead of solid composition and respectable lyrics, excessive jamming. These are bands because they want to play instruments, and not because they want to write songs, and it doesn’t work out well.

I will probably revise this with further thoughts when I am less tired.

I’m a legend in the locker room.

I enjoy the Gym Class Heroes. Really only As Cruel As Schoolchildren, but Papercut Chronicles is good too. I never cared about them — I liked Cupid’s Chokehold and didn’t know anything else — until I saw them live, and I fell in love. Travis McCoy is an amazing frontman. He’s neurotic and funny and energetic. He got two girls from the crowd up on stage between songs, and was talking about how beautiful they are for a while. He then said, “but looks can be deceiving,” and started talking about how women are bitches and shit and then played “Cupid’s Chokehold” or something. It was great.

Anyway. I saw them twice, listened to them all the time, and then broke up with my girlfriend and haven’t listened to them since, because we spent hella time driving around with Schoolchildren on my stereo. I decided the other day, though, that I don’t care anymore, so I’m listening to them again. They still rock!

“Cupid’s Chokehold” is still an amazing love song, and “The Queen And I” is rockin’. They do a great job of keeping a pop sensibility while touching on more serious subjects: “The Queen And I” could be a dance song but it’s about dating an alcoholic girl and not being able to fix it because he’s scared of losing her, so he won’t leave her or try to stop her drinking. It’s depressing!

“Viva La White Girl” bores me, I never really got the hype on that one.

“Clothes Off!” remains an amazing dance song, with such sublime lines as “on a scale from one to awesome, I’m the shit” and “My leg’s going numb from keeping my phone on vibrate to hide the fact that your girlfriend keeps texting me.” His cockiness is awesome. On the other hand, “New Friend Request” is just funny (and I rather like the video). It’s one of the only sort of joking song about technology and nerdiness that I think stands up as a good song, because it’s about how sad he is that he can’t even find a girl on Myspace.

Some of the songs get sort of boring from their guitar-riffs over rap drum beats style, which gets tiresome unless done extremely well. Overall, I think the album sounds good, has a lot of content (the songs aren’t all silly pop songs) and he’s got a good flowing going. It’s worth a listen.

You Belong To Me

There’s a new Taylor Swift song out, “You Belong With Me.” It’s pretty juvenile, with lines like “she doesn’t get your humour like I do,” but the chorus has a really pretty hook. She sings, “Why cant you see you belong with me?” and she sounds great. This alone would justify the existence of the song, except she should be singing “you belong to me.” I like the idea of belonging and possession.

Avett Brothers

I saw the Avett Brothers live in Roanoke last night. It was quite an excellent show! They were extremely energetic: especially the cellist, Joe Kwon, who is the only cellist I’ve ever seen who holds the cello in his arms and dances around while playing. Seriously. And the brothers themselves, especially banjoist Scott Avett, were very enthusiastic, screaming and jumping around and so forth. Because they don’t really have a drummer, Scott has a kick drum in front of him and Seth has a highhat cymbal, and at one point Seth, instead of just using the HH foot pedal, just straight up kicked the shit out of it!

The performance was awesome. “Die, Die, Die,” already a good song, gave chills live, and even songs like “Weight of Lies,” of which I am less than enamored, were rousing and fun. The crowd was really happy to be there: mostly 20something country types dancing around like no one was watching. There was no light show or anything to speak of, just a backdrop that occasionally changed — the first time the backdrop raised to reveal the new picture underneath, the guy behind me was breathless: “Whoa, is it raising? The background is raising! It’s changing!” which was bizarre and funny — which was well suited to the unpretentious show.

There were also a couple old-style mostly humorous songs on serious subjects, like the Seth solo “On The Curve,” I think it was called, about driving too fast around a curve and living due to the grace of God. Those were big crowd favourites, and quite entertaining. Most of the songs, though, were about the normal Avett Brothers subjects: your friends will desert you, women will break your heart, and your past is never leaving you behind. Half the songs I didn’t already know opened with lines like, “I want friends that I can trust,” to give you an idea, but they ended with “Salvation Song,” an uplifting number concluding with a singalong chant of “We came here to leave behind the world a better way.”

(The opening band was boring: the girl was trying to sound like Leslie Feist, and the songs all sounded kind of samey except one or two with a cool beat. she also danced like an idiot. Seth Avett, however, told us that we had to buy their record or he would kill us, so if I don’t post again, blame him.)

Sonic Aged

I have many things to say. Most of them are about Sonic Youth.

About a month ago, I bought tickets to a Sonic Youth concert. I started listening to them very heavily, because I hadn’t in a while and I like to do that to prepare. In doing so, I discovered that I like Evol, but not all of it, and that Goo is a lot better than I ever gave it credit for — the first few tracks are pretty wonderful. Sister and Daydream Nation are probably still the best, though. Check out “Stereo Sanctity” and “Kissability” for good examples (That’s not a great recording of the first, and I couldn’t find a listenable video of the latter, sorry).

I also bought the new album, The Eternal expecting — rightly, it turns out — them to play a lot of songs from it. I’m pretty neutral towards it as a whole; there’s some good stuff and some bad stuff. The lead single, “Sacred Trickster” didn’t impress me much on record, but it blew me away live. I also like “Antenna” a lot (again, sorry, no very good video that I found) — it’s a sweet love song, “radios play nothing when she’s far away/ TV antenna’s rusted – gone to waste” is a lovely line for a person who likes girls and music. “No Way” is an awesome kiss-off song, and I have no idea what “What We Know” is about but it sure sounds great. The rest of the tracks vary from mediocre to boring all the way down to unpleasant — I’d rather not hear a 40 year old Kim Gordon shrieking unplasantly about rivers, actually — and the pacing isn’t perfect, but what’s really remarkable is that they sure as hell still sound like Sonic Youth. There’s more emphasis on the slower songs, I guess because they’re mellowing a little and their voices don’t shriek like they once did, but it’s still obviously a sonic youth album.

Anyway, so I saw them live last night with my friend Sarah. They were really good! I wasn’t sure, because they’re kind of old and I don’t think they tour a lot and I wasn’t sure if they’d play noisy songs that wouldn’t get a lot of energy live, but they rocked out. One of the best things about the experience was how unbelievably happy Kim looked the whole time. She was just rockin’ out for the first song or two, but when she dropped the guitar in favour of the mic to bust out her excellent performance of “Sacred Trickster,” she was dancing and grooving and smiling and obviously very pleased. The rest of the band looked happy too — Thurston was obviously having a grand time jamming to his songs, and Ranaldo and Shelley were also getting into it; I almost never had a view of Ibold, so who can say — and it just really added to the experience. Shows where everyone is trying to look cool are boring, I’m glad the band and the crowd* were so into it, it made me really happy.

I also never realized just how many songs Kim and Lee Ranaldo sang. I don’t pay that much attention to most of the vocals and just sort of assumed Thurston sang all the male parts, but apparently Lee sings a lot of things, and more of those squeaky songs are Kim than just high-pitched Thurston. Who knew?

They didn’t play a whole ton of old stuff. They played “Hey Joni,” another song that I didn’t realize I loved until I heard it live, and “Beauty Lies In The Eye,” which I was neutral towards and remain. They also probably played other old things that I didn’t recognize and/or can’t think of: I like Sonic Youth, but there’s only a few songs I really recognize well except for by the chorus or whatever; it’s more about the sound, really. The live performances of some of the new things were not impressive: “Leaky Lifeboat” is still just boring, “Thunderclap” improved a little but meh. I also take issue with their sometimes excessive use of feedback and noise. It’s cool when a song ends with a few chill moments of just aimless noise, but when it goes on too loud and has too little going on to latch onto or is drenched in feedback, it’s just annoying. All in all, an awesome show despite some weak moments. I’m glad I went: fun trip, awesome show, bragging rights! I also got a t-shirt.

Oh, the opening band was boring. They were called The Entrance Band, which is an awful name, and played a sort of prog/post-rock version of the Led Zeppelin-style chaff overgrown long-haired 15 year old boys have been playing for decades. It didn’t make it any better.

I’m gonna go not listen to Sonic Youth now, because I’ve listened to their show and three of their records in the last 28 hours and that’s way too much.

*There was a girl up on the balcony (this was at the 9:30 club) who was SO into it. She had her shirt off, was obviously drunk, and was leaning over the railing and playing air guitar and shouting happy things at the band until security took her away (or at least away from the railing). She was exciting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKlbBgQHPqo

I can’t get no!

In the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” Mick Jagger sings, “When I’m watching my TV and a man comes on and tells me / how white my shirts could be, but he / can’t be a man, ’cause he doesn’t smoke — the same cigarettes as me.” (around 1:40)

This isn’t a particularly great line, but his delivery elevates it. The man is obviously advertising some brand-name bleach or something, and Mick Jagger is rejecting this idea (that there’s a bleach that will make his shirts whiter than they currently are just because it has a different brand name) but at the same time he’s rejecting the idea that he can trust this man regardless, because he doesn’t smoke the right brand of cigarettes. It sounds like he’s going to be saying, “he’s a pussy ’cause he doesn’t smoke,” but then he pulls out the last phrase delayed a little and you realize he’s admitting that despite his rejection of advertising and branding, he is nonetheless its victim.