Category: music

As you’ve probably noticed, I resist what’s popular until I just can’t take it anymore and then embrace it as soon as everyone else has found it and proclaimed it to be the Best Thing In The Whole Wide World™. Well, here I go again. Heather got Coldplay’s Parachutes for Christmas and wow, it’s just great. I haven’t heard the new one yet (because Heather hasn’t let me borrow it yet), but Parachutes is just great. It’s moody, mellow and is great “float away into what you’re doing” background music. I’ve been listening to the album for a couple hours now, and I’ve finally figured out why it sounds so familiar. Colplay’s lead singer sounds an awful lot like Jeff Buckley, especially on the second track, Shiver. I loved Grace, and this album sounds a lot like it, which isn’t a bad thing. I know you all know this already, but I figured I’d share anyway.

Speaking of things I know that you probably already do too, I got Eddie Izzard’s Dress to Kill on DVD for Christmas. Now, I’d seen the show on HBO about a million times, but wanted a DVD to watch when I’m sick, and something I can loan to friends who haven’t been indoctrinated yet. The coolest bonus of the whole thing is that there’s a show Eddie did in Paris as a prep for his new show, Circle. It’s all in French, but has sub-titles, which were nice for them big words and funky conjugations I didn’t get. It’s mostly his older material, but there were some great new bits in it. My favorite being (and this is a paraphrase, because it was in this big thing about the Renaissance), “You know, I’m just like Leonardo Da Vinci. He invented this helicopter that doesn’t work, and when I was seven, I also invented a helicopter that doesn’t work!! I’m a bloody genius, I tell you.” It was funnier in French… I swear it was.

“it’s like the bastard offspring of Enya and Radiohead” – See, I post something and the world goes crazy. Now, I can’t go five minutes without seeing something else about Sigur Ros.

As an addendum, Amazon is offering a free download of a couple of Sigur Ros’ songs off of Agaetis Byrjun. The title track is one of them, and it is gorgeous. They played it last night and it almost brought me to tears. They overdid the end of the song, but the first ten minutes were musical bliss. The album track has all of the beauty with just the right amount of feedback.

The story is more in the getting there and home than in the concert itself, but I’ll tell you about the concert first, since the trip took longer than the music lasted. The four of us, Jen, Heather, and Steve made the trek downtown for the show. For the uninitiated, Sigur Ros is an Icelandic band. The lead singer has a voice that lives in the octaves above Radiohead‘s Thom Yorke. It’s haunting and downright beautiful. He plays his guitar with a bow about half the time, and can create quite a noise with it, alternatingly gorgeous and horrible. Their drummer is chock full of energy, although his solo was overly repetetive for a drum solo. He was just keeping the beat, only louder.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. The opening act was another Icelandic musician who came out in a black t-shirt, armed with an acoustic guitar and a chair. He spoke in English with an outrageous Icelandic accent (Steve said, “Did he justs say, ‘A glass moose eye is glass’?”). Unfortunately, his songs were also sung in English and were completely unintelligible, both because of his accent and the fact that he mumbled like a Nordic Bob Dylan on Valium. I made out the following phrases:

• Even eagles cry (repeated about a million times)

• something something… dive into you.. something else something else

• She had purple eyes… blah blah… Icelandic sky

I would have been OK with a folksy opening act if he weren’t so bad. He constantly messed up changes and when he flubbed, instead of playing over it like he meant to do that (like we would have known the difference), he paused right in the middle of the song, and sometimes said “oopsy”. It was entertaining.

Then… we waited. I don’t know what it is about concert nowadays but why are there always at least 20 minutes between the opening act and the headliner? It happened when we saw No Doubt, and it happened last night too. It’s just stupid. The point of an opener is to warm up the audience. Why do that, if you’re just going to let them cool off for twenty minutes between the two? The stage was already set up for the band, why not just come right on out and get started?

Eventually, Sigur Ros made it to the stage. They had quite a show for it being a smaller theater. They had a huge screen behind them where they played distorted videos of children playing, power lines, a sleeping old man’s face (that was the first and most impressive… uber-creepy). Before I get into how they sounded, I will couch this with the fact that I’ve only ever heard one of their songs and had no idea what to expect. So, my hour with the band was my only exposure, and that may color this commentary. Heather and I really dug the concert. Jen hated it, and Steve said it was “weird”. The only musical comparison I can make is that they sound a little like Radiohead in concert. The lead singer sings in this lilting Icelandic falsetto the whole time (all the lyrics are in Icelandic, which is a pretty melodic language). The music is sometimes overly repetetive, but overall, I really liked their sound. They fell into some classic rock concert traps like overdoing it with the screeching, ear-bleeding feedback when they really didn’t need to, and their set seemed almost too choreographed. They played for maybe an hour, with no encores even though the audience went nuts and the band came out for two bows. Every non-classical, amateur concert I’ve been to since I was 13 has had at least one encore. I was pretty disappointed that bowing counts in their book.

Overall, I give their performance a B. The lighting and screen effects were cool, and I never once thought they should get off the stage (except the extended feedback song… why, Icelandic guys, why?). I probably wouldn’t go see them again, but I may go buy an album or two.

Thus ends the concert report, and begins the horrible trip report

Before I begin, let me give you the stats:

• Miles: A trip that should have been 60 miles round-trip took almost 150.

• Drive Time: 1.5 hours planned, 4 hours actual

• Unintentional Monument / Landmark Sitings / Major Bridge Crossings:
  • The Washington Monument (Jen’s Barometer for how lost we get when we go downtown): 9 – a new Lawver record

  • The Pentagon: 3

  • The Capitol Building: 2

  • Thomas Jefferson Memorial: 1

  • The Key Bridge: 2 crossings (1 was intended, the second was a bonus)

  • The Theodore Roosevelt Bridge: 1 crossing (none intended)

  • The Woodrow Wilson Bridge: 2 crossings (none intended)

  • The State of Maryland: 1 entrance, and thankfully, one exit

• Major Freeways / Roadways Driven On (unintended/accidental in bold):
  • 495

  • 395

  • 66

  • Route 1

  • Whitehurst Freeway

  • George Washington Parkway (1 intentional, 1 accidental)

  • Route 7: from Falls Church to Tysons Corner

  • The Dulles Toll Road

  • Route 28

Here’s my tip to you, as a freebie: never trust MapQuest‘s driving directions when going into the district. Take my brother Steve and a good map (I recommend the ADC map book). We got so turned around and messed up that it took him taking over with the map to get us where we needed to be. Luckily (or unluckily depending on your point of view, Jen), we got the show in time, but it took us 2.5 hours to get home. I hate driving in DC, and have decided to either rent a limo, take the limo (which would probably never happen, which means:) or just not go.

I’m sitting here watching Bittersweet Motel waiting for Sunday Night Football to come on, and my headache to leave. It’s the Phish concert movie. It has some really funny interviews with the band and live and (odd) other versions of the songs from my favorite album: Billy Breathes. It’s an interesting portrait of the band. They’re all so New England quirky (as opposed to Southern Quirky… sorry, this is a stupid line, but I’m too tired to backspace).

The band is releasing a lot of their live shows on CD this fall, most importantly, the Halloween shows where they pick another band’s album to cover. I really want to hear their cover of The White Album and Remain in the Light by the Talking Heads. Hear that folks? Good Christmas present ideas… or Hannukah or Thanksgiving even.

So, the big order from Amazon showed up yesterday with Jen’s Gift Pack and my CD’s. I got Jen the new remastered Grease DVD, the soundtrack, the Grease II soundtrack, Carole King’s remastered Tapestry and A3’s Exile on Coldharbor Lane because she loves the Sopranos theme song, but I don’t like the rest of the songs on the soundtrack. I’ve been listening to the album this morning, and it’s right up my alley. It’s a weird combination of styles, but I love it. Take a little bit of Robbie Robertson’s self-titled solo album, Leonard Cohen, Acid Jazz, rap, a little early Moby beat, and rockabilly. It’s crazy, and there’s some foul language (that’s for you, Heather), but it’s so much fun, I can’t stop listening to it.

I also ordered Ben Folds’ Rockin’ the Suburbs, Thievery Corporation’s DJ Kicks and Lamb’s self-titled debut. I somehow forgot to rip Lamb, so it’s still at home and I haven’t listened to it yet. I also haven’t finished DJ Kicks, but I’ve heard almost all of those songs at some point on other compilations or from friends, so I’m pretty secure in saying that I’ll love it.

Rockin’ the Suburbs is Ben Folds’ funniest album yet. All the other albums have funny lines and some songs that amuse and delight, but this one is far and away the funniest. The title track is great, but it doesn’t end there. On top of being funny, there isn’t a dud on the album. All the songs are tight, catchy and well-crafted. Not once did I skip a track just to get to the next song, or think a song was self-indulgent. It’s a great album.

Why didn’t anyone tell me Peter Gabriel released a new album? He did, and it’s been ordered. It’ll show up with my copy of My Neighbor Totoro sometime in December. Thankfully, you can download the whole album to “preview” it. It’s great. It’s not quite worth the decade it’s taken to get out, and he gets one black mark for including the song I Grieve from the City of Angels soundtrack on it. I love the song, but come on, the album averages out to one song per year since Us came out. I know the man’s been busy greying, but jeez. Really, the album’s beautiful. It’s more melancholy than Us. For some reason, it reminds me of the Birdy soundtrack more than anything else, and I can’t really place why.

If you’ve got a fast connection, go get it right now (it’s a 69mb download, so you modem folks are SOL)!

Another gift from a friend, I got Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, and wow. This is an amazing album. It came out in 1991, but sounds like it could have come out yesterday. It sounds fresh and new, and combines all of my favorite bands. It sounds at times like Phish, Moby, Massive Attack and well, it sounds like everything. A great trippy happy groove album to keep you smiling. Check it out.

I’ve ripped all my Morphine albums now except Cure for Pain, which I’ve misplaced somewhere.

Morphine was my favorite band of the 90’s. Their mellow bass driven lounge rock was perfect. Their first three albums, Good, Cure for Pain and Yes are essential members of any good music library and great artillery for self-indulgent pity parties, rainy evenings at home alone or car-music for a night out cruising the back streets of Tucson looking for a party where you know what street it’s not, but not the address of the house (sorry, that was a flashback).

Like Swimming was an unfortunate smudge on the library. It’s not bad, but it’s definitely not Cure for Pain. With Mark Sandman’s untimely death of a heart attack at the age of 36 (he looked a lot older than that… played a three-string bass ages you, I guess), I figured I was left with the four albums, and I’d never hear more. But, ‘lo and behold, along came The Night, my second favorite Morphine album. It’s the slowest moving and most morose, but the songs are some of Sandman’s best. All of them are better than every song on Like Swimming, and better than half the songs on Good or Yes. It doesn’t quite stack up to Cure for Pain for sheer impact, but it’s amazing.

And to finish up, there’s B Side and Otherwise, an album you can skip unless you just want to be complete, and Bootleg Detroit, the band’s only release live album. It’s amazing. In the audio alone you can feel Sandman’s stage presence, and the band’s skill at creating a vibe in a room. The second song on the CD, Come Along sets the mood for the set perfectly and isn’t on any of their other albums. It’s almost the perfect live album. If only it were longer. I’m always left wanting more when I listen to it.

This has ended up a lot longer than I intended, but I guess you can tell I love me some Morphine. I will be eternally grateful to my friend Kris for introducing me to the band. She made me a mix tape after a rough breakup of the best depressing songs ever. She has the musical Library of Congress in her head, sorted by theme. On the tape were You Look Like Rain and Gone for Good. I wore that tape out, and eventually wore out my copy of Cure for Pain. You will too.

In my recent techno-obsession, I’ve forgotten all about Phish. Today, I’m listening to a bunch of their albums, and the first one I picked up is still my favorite. Billy Breathes is an amazing album. In the album’s 45 minutes, Phish manages to use all of their talent to create an album that sounds better than anything else they’ve done. It has all the punch, joy and great riffs of their other stuff without any of the self-indulgence. This is a great album if you want to try Phish on for size before plowing into their weirder stuff (or live albums).