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08.30.06 Throughout the chaos, only one thing seemed clear: The driver was on a hunt. A hunt for humans. Thank you, San Francisco Chronicle, for take a really bizarre, awful event (let's avoid the obviousness of the word "tragedy") and turning it into something really stupid and melodramatic. Quality writing free zone begins here. # A special treat for you this morning. To celebrate the first sunny morning we've had all week here. The first track from the new, as-of-yet-unreleased Rapture album. The track, called Don Gon Do It, has everything you'd expect (cowbell! dance!) and more. What's more, you ask? Well, try a bit of soaring vocal harmony (picture your favorite moment of studio-diva vibrato) and a great synth-y 80's guitar riff. And if you know me, you know how I feel about 80's guitar riffs. It takes a lot to impress. check it. There's a lot of good stuff on their new album, and some of it's already out and about on the internets (tubes! it's made of tubes!). Without much effort you can check out two other great tracks, Get Myself Into It and W.A.Y.U.H. (which stands for Whoo! Alright- Yeah...Uh Huh and more or less lambasts the too-cool-to-dance indierock mantra, which The Rapture is here to destroy). # 08.26.06 The first Animal Collective song I heard was this, Grass (from the album Feels but found by me on the single) and it set a personal bar that I've yet to find their music crossing. Not that they're not experts at weirdness. But I've yet to find another song that does weird-pop with quite the same voracity. This has made it onto every running mix I've made since I first got it. # Rumors of this website's untimely demise have been greatly exaggerated. It's just that I've been...busy. I never quite followed up on my announcement of the change-of-job; suffice it to say that I have a whole new world of responsibility here. The good part of that is that I'm printing things I've never printed before, and doing stuff that's shock-and-awe cool (to a print production manager, that is) that I've never done or even seen before. The downside of that is that the birthing process for a great idea is never quite as well planned or executed as my orderly mind might like it to be. So anyway, the question has been lingering for me: what to do with the website? I could keep trickling out updates every few weeks, random little one-off posts that seem to reveal less and less about my life (let's face it, I've gotten over the idea of public/private indiscretion), or I could refocus on something easier for me to manage. David briefly suggested more mp3's, and that's pretty much the route I'm going to take. I'm listening to more and more music and thinking more and more critically about it. So I'm going to take that by the reigns and go with it. You'll still see some entries from me here and there about what I've been up to. And not every music post will be a full-on thesis on the state of the genre. But I'm hoping to provide a fairly consistent stream of stuff that I've been listening to. Hopefully, it will be a good way for some of you (but not you) to hear some new music that, hopefully, you'll enjoy. There's no desire here to start a real, bona-fide MP3 Blog a la said the gramophone or anything like that. But hopefully there's some use to a more personal system of recommendation, since the general readership of this site consists of entirely of my friends, and a few hardy non-friend readers who've been hanging around for a long time. (Evan and Steve, I know you both read from time to time, and I know you'll almost never be surprised by what you find here, as half of it at least came from the two of you.) So then, I hope you enjoy it and find something new and fun that you like. # 08.25.06 As an accompaniment to it's piece on gentrification in the city of Los Angeles, the LA Times has a funny (but largely true) sidebar on the 5 warning signs of gentrification. Very LA, but it could pretty easily apply to many parts of SF, if you traded subtrim for farmer's markets. (Then again, what's not gentrified in SF at this point?) # 08.24.06 There's a great review over at Pitchfork of the new Mountain Goats album, Get Lonely. I listened to it the other day, while I was doing something, so it kind of fell into the background of my attention. About halfway through the album, and halfway through my housecleaning chores, I felt an inexplicable and unexpected desire to sit down and cry. This beautiful album is like a depression virus; if you come into contact with it, you will be infected by it's near-morbid sadness. Given how wonderful an album it is though, it's well worth enduring a few tears. # 08.09.06 Check out urban counterfeiters, a blog that's tracking instances of retail/design plagiarism. They showcase instances in which small designers work is ripped off by larger "hip" retail company's like H&M and Urban Outfitters. Not that I haven't shopped at either of those stores ever, but this is certainly the start of a compelling case against them both. # 08.05.06 The other night, Jen invited me, as she sometimes does, to be her plus-one for a show. She had heard an advance from the label and thought they were interesting enough to check out, if not exactly her thing. I gave a few cursory listens to tracks available online and decided it would be worth seeing. The band was Hot Chip and I dare say that I'm in love with them. Sadly, not from the show, which was quite good but not really to my liking. (Aside: the problem I think, was that the more organic class of percussion they use is mixed well below the electronic on the album; those sounds naturally rise to the surface however in a live performance. This is all well and good if you like the organic sounds more than the electronic, which in this case I did not.) That said, I have since aquired the album and I'm loving it. The first half is very upbeat, while the second half is very chill-out. My favorite track on the album, and by far the most infections (HeadOn: apply directly to forehead) is Over and Over. Check it out. # « July 2006 | archive index | September 2006 » built with movabletype |
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