Don’t Get Sentimental

That boom you just heard was this guy breaking the blogging barrier by finally posting to this musical love fest. I don’t know much about music that you don’t already know. I do, however, have lots of time to kill at work that I sometimes spend pondering mythical blog posts. Side note: I spent most of one work day earlier this week boring three holes through a golf ball using only a thumb tack and a pair of metal scissors. I also took a two hour lunch and made a few work calls.

Anyways, forget top 10 Radiohead playlists (though I do love Radiohead) and updates on bands you’ve never heard of. I’m bringing you U.S. Census Bureau-y goodness.

I stumbled across a statistic they keep based on decennial census data called the “geographic center of the U.S. population.” Basically, if you flattened the U.S., placed equally heavy weights where every person lives and got rid of all the other garbage (buildings, mountains, etc.), the geographic center is where you could perfectly balance the map.

Expanding on this with my very limited math prowess (hardly a prowess, or even basic understanding), I figured you could draw a line through that point in any direction and exactly half the population would be on one side and half on the other.

Naturally, the thought drifted to which side would win in different scenarios, and then to which side I would pick.

My question to you readers (Dave, Marcelo) in true Risk style, is how do you orient the line and which side do you pick in a fight?

I go diagonal from the upper left hand corner to lower right and take the Northeastern side. Com sa.

(That’s me in the sweet Napoleon hat. Not to scale, except for my head.)

Rationale:

1. The Pacific Northwest is for pussies.

2. The Rockies, while scenic, really make logistics a nightmare.

3. Better transportation network in the Northeast.

4. Texas blows.

5. The Northeast holds the perfect combination of downtrodden working poor and rich intelligista to create the ultimate war machine.

6. Alaska, except for most of the Aleutian Islands, are mine. And Alaskans are bad ass.

Here’s how it looks on a map of the oldest Jewish congregations by state:

So, grab this map and do it yourself.

http://www.nightscaping.com/dealerselect1/select_images/usa_map.gif

My one musical ref, straight outta nicktpwn, on the ‘tunes: LCD Soundsystem, Someone Great

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New York based producer and multi-instrumentalist Cassettes Won’t Listen, has recently become somewhat of an indie darling, being featured on Gorilla vs. Bear, as well as being asked by artists such as El-P, Dr. Octagon, Mr. Lif, and others to do remixes of their songs.

Recently however, he caught my attention with his five song cover EP, Small-Time Machine, featuring some obscure and classic indie songs, including one of my personal indie favorites, “Cut Your Hair” by Pavement. I’ll make sure to have a post titled “if I ever lived out my dream as a musician, these are the five songs I would cover” in the future, but for now I’ll stick to talking about this sweet cover and the original Pavement version.

“Cut Your Hair” is clearly about selling out and the role that image plays in the music industry, and somewhat ironically is Pavement’s best known song. Still though, to cover a Pavement song, you have to be pretty ambitious, and to pull it off while still making it your own takes real skill. And CWL did an outstanding job covering it.

You can get the five song EP for free on his website, and get a feel for his original songs while browsing through the rest of his site.

Pavement-Cut Your Hair

Cassettes Won’t Listen - Cut Your Hair (Pavement Cover)

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Summertime, and the music’s easy.  I hate to say I like Adron because her music floats along breezily in the background, because that’s selling her short.  It’s also true, but that’s only part of the story.

Adron (real name: Adrienne McCann) is a twenty two (?) year-old singer-songwriter from Atlanta, Georgia, with a distinctly Brazilian sound.  On her self-titled debut, Adron plays all the instruments herself, everything from guitar to harpsichord to bird-noises.  There is minimal percussion on most songs, usually not more than some maracas or egg-shakers.

The real magic comes from the way her voice intertwines with the bossa nova plucking of her guitar, and the effect is like the warm sun on your back as you step out of the ocean.  To me, Adron is a great album for a relaxing day at the beach, but even better for a rum and coke later that night.

Lousy analogies aside, Adron has a beautiful sound form-fit for the last month or so of summer, so check her out.  Also, as of the writing of this post, she only has 971 plays over at Last.fm, so go grab her album and give her some love.

Adron - Stringsong

Adron on Myspace

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To echo Dave’s sentiments on music, the internet, and having so many different artists to listen to, it only gets more complicated when you throw older artists into the mix.

The music industry is just that. An industry. And albums have been cranked out for decades and decades, leaving us with a very rich and diverse musical history. Still, it’s hard to sort through all of it, and going back and getting into artists or albums that were around before you were even born can be tricky. For all you know, you might be living your life missing out on some great music that really works for you.

That being said, music still gets passed down to us through numerous avenues. Our parents, friends, TV, radio, movies, the internet, and finding out which artists influenced our favorite artists. If it wasn’t for The Life Aquatic, or the fact that David Bowie is the most referenced musician in the Venture Bros., I may have never really gotten into him.

There are a few covers of Bowie songs that also played a big role along the way, particularly Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” and the Get Up Kids’ cover of “Suffragette City.” Recently all of these things clicked, and really got me into a lot Bowie’s stuff, particularly the album, “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”

In summary, I say keep digging for music and sorting through stuff. It might also be good to learn how to pronounce artists’ names to avoid mishaps like Avril Lavigne’s mispronunciation of “Bowie.” Rhymes with “snowy” not “Maui.”

Here are a few tracks from Ziggy Stardust.

David Bowie-Starman

David Bowie-Ziggy Stardust

David Bowie-Suffragette City

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“I thought I was the illest.” Those are Biggie’s words referring to R.A. the Rugged Man, who is perhaps the underground’s best kept secret, the rap industry’s worst nightmare, the greatest rapper in history, or all of the above. Biggie and the Rugged Man did a song together circa ‘93, which lead to that comment. If you’re not familiar with the Rugged Man, he’s a legend in that he’s been around forever, and has quite the reputation.

He was signed to Jive Records when he was 18, but due to his personality and his actions (some say along the lines of violence, some along the lines of sexual harrassment) he was dropped and barred from getting signed again for quite some time. He has been offered dozens of record deals, and has collaborated with some of the greatest mainstream, as well as underground hip hop artists.

If you’re a Jedi Mind Tricks fan, he’s featured on “Uncommon Valor: A Vietnam Story,” in which he tells the story of his father, a Vietnam veteran exposed to agent orange, which lead to R.A.’s brother and sister being handicapped, with his brother eventually dying at the age of ten. He mentions these parts of his life some of his other songs as well, such as in “Lessons,” where he states, “I seen my little brother Maxx fall asleep, and he ain’t never wake up,” and later mentions his bouts with mental illness in the same song.

His content covers everything from being a white rapper, to being broke and homeless, to discussing how so many others made millions off of his style. His flow is brilliant, and one of a kind, and his voice is unlike anyone else’s. He’s really worth listening to if you’re a fan of hip hop. Mainstream or underground. It doesn’t matter.

R.A. The Rugged Man- On The Block

R.A. The Rugged Man- Lessons

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Let me begin by saying this is no easy task. I have obsessed over each and every song on this list at some point in my life (as well as songs not on this list), and narrowing this list down to ten songs was a real challenge. Not only that, I also have put them in order from my all time favorite, Number 1 on this list (duh),  to number 10.

I was initially going to post these as a comment to Dave’s Top 10, but I had too much to say about each song. So here they are. From 10 to 1. It’s a countdown. It’s the final countdown.

10.  The Bends (from the album The Bends) - Great song. Flat out. It starts off with some weird sounds that apparently Thom recorded outside a hotel. Then all of a sudden you get hit with that really bright and crunchy guitar riff. The lyrics are some of the best in the Radiohead catalogue in my opinion, including some personal favorites like “the planet is a gunboat in a sea of fear,” and “alone on an aeroplane, fall asleep on against the window pane, my blood will thicken,” among others.

9. Optimistic (from the album Kid A) - Yeah, it was a single. But nonetheless an amazing song. Great lyrically as well, painting some dark and twisted images on the human condition such as ”nervous messed up marionettes, floating around on a prison ship.” Plus that lead into In Limbo…

8. Let Down (from the album OK Computer) - A song of sheer desperation. Or maybe not. Maybe just a casual observation on every day life while being completely removed from it, just watching the people coming and going. Either way it’s incredible lyrically, and musically it’s beautiful.

7. Everything in Its Right Place (from the album Kid A) - One of the best album openers ever. Of any album I have ever listened to. I remember when I heard it for the first time, and I knew I was about to hear something that I had never heard anything even remotely close to before. And I was right.

6. Lucky (from the album OK Computer) - Starting out with the sounds of what is apparently Ed’s guitar being played on the strings above the nut, on the head stock through a delay pedal, this song transforms into a beautiful epic, with the guitars hinting at dark undertones, until the 3:12 mark where they surface completely, only to resolve beautifully into a guitar solo at 3:46. A masterpiece both lyrically and musically.

5. I Might Be Wrong (from the album Amnesiac) - A powerful guitar driven track on a very dark and electronic sound based album. It is an incredible combination of styles and sounds. The highlight for me is the buildup, and then when it completely breaks down around the 3:50 mark.

4. Kid A (from the album Kid A) - A song unlike any other. Thom’s voice is distorted and twisted (to distance himself from the heavy lyrical content according to some sources), which kind of reinvents vocals, and the role of a vocalist, and makes them into more of an instrument.

3. Knives Out (from the album Amnesiac) - Creating an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, this song is one of Radiohead’s best in my opinion, with the repetitive guitar riffs, Thom’s haunting vocals, and lyrics to match. “If you’d been a dog, they would have drowned you at birth.”

2. Motion Picture Soundtrack (from the album Kid A) - Everything in Its Right Place is a great opener. Motion Picture Soundtrack is an incredible closer. One of the best I can think of. It has always sounded like the end to me. It’s what I expect to hear at the end if that makes any sense. If there is a heaven, this is what it sounds like going in. Simply beautiful.

1. Street Spirit (Fade Out) (from the album The Bends) - This is the greatest closer of any album I have ever heard. It stands on its own. It is unlike every other song on The Bends, but doesn’t fit on any Radiohead album really. But it is “THE” Radiohead song to me. According to the band, they didn’t write the song. It wrote itself. They were simply its “biological catalysts.” A hopeless song about living in a world filled with identical mass produced homes, cold detached machines that we created and depend on to run our lives, and finally, about staring death straight in the face. Despite all the things described in the song, there is still a glimmer of hope at the end with the closing line “immerse your soul in love.”

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Saw this over at Green Plastic Radiohead.  If you can manage to pare your favorite Radiohead songs down to 10 picks, some enterprising fan is going to be running something of a Radiohead March Madness.  Check it out: Radiohead Tournament

My picks:

1. Reckoner
2. Everything in it’s Right Place
3. Pyramid Song
4. Let Down
5. 15 Steps
6. The Bends
7. Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)
8. Lucky
9. Morning Bell
10. Dollars and Cents

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We’re working our way (I’m working my way?) up to newer music on this blog, but as we’re just getting started I feel compelled to point out all of the great music I’ve accumulated over the last few months/years.  Also, we currently have zero audience so it’s all relative I suppose.

Regardless, I feel like just as the internet has opened me up to a multitude of new music, it’s also made it that much harder to focus on any one particular new artist.  Often times I’ll find two or three new albums in one day and I don’t always give them the attention that I should.  That said, this is one album that sucked me in from the first track and quickly distinguished itself from the masses of my iTunes playlist.

I picked up Marry Me by St. Vincent sometime in 2007, and even as I skip through any number of great albums, there is not a song on this album that I cannot listen to all the way through.  I had the fortune of seeing them a few months ago at the Rock and Roll Hotel in DC, and the even greater fortune of being able to snag a place right up in front of the stage.

Now, to be fair, I cannot safely say how much of that performance was great because of the music and how much was simply the fact that I could not look away from Annie Clark’s super-intense eyes (even in pictures, it’s impossible to look away, and if you don’t believe me, check out the video below).  Either way, this former (and current?) member of the Polyphonic Spree has a solo album that is packed with inventive instrumentation and even more inventive lyrics (”Your lips are red / My face is red from reading your red lips”).

What strikes me most about the music is Annie’s guitar.  I can’t quite articulate what makes it so special, but there’s a certain controlled yet absolutely free sound that surprises me every time.  You’d think at some point that the electric guitar couldn’t surprise you, but then you hear a song like “Jesus Saves, I Spend” and it’s like hearing the instrument again for the first time.

St. Vincent - Jesus Saves, I Spend

St. Vincent - Your Lips are Red:

Pick up Marry Me at Amazon

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So what has Zach de la Rocha been up to since Rage Against the Machine? There were rumors of a solo album for a while, a few loose tracks here and there, but then things were quiet for quite some time. Out of nowhere one of my friends told me about One Day as a Lion, de la Rocha’s newest project with former Mars Volta drummer Jon Theodore. Up until July 16th, when the first track was released for public consumption, the only thing we knew was that de la Rocha would be providing his influential vocals, as well as manning the keyboards, and Jon Theodore would be on drums. And Theodore’s not just any drummer. He’s got quite the resume, having played with a long list of bands, including the highly experimental cats from the Mars Volta. As I mentioned, the first song “Wild International” was debuted on July 16th, and as of the 18th, their myspace page has over a million views. ”Wild International” can be found via their myspace page or their website. To be honest with you, I’m eating this stuff up, and I can’t wait ’til the album is released. The EP comes out on the 22nd, and I’ll probably pick it up at a local record store and maybe get a similar rush to when I was in middle school/high school listening to Rage religiously, and feeling a bit rebellious in purchasing my neatly packaged revolution. Jokes and hypocrisy cracks aside, with Zach’s kickass vocals, raw keys, and Theodore’s heavy hitting drums, this is an album to look forward to.

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Part of the reason I wanted to start this site is to streamline the way I go about telling my friends about cool music.  Instead of say, pestering them in person and online everytime I think of a great song, it would be easier to just put them all in one place.  Hence this site, and the first song/album/artist I want to point out is “No One Said It Would Be Easy,” by Cloud Cult.

I’ve only just recently discovered them, and I’m slowly making my way through their back catalogue.  It’s some really inventive ensemble music that swings effortlessly between the absurd and the profound.  I implore anyone to listen to this song just once.

Cloud Cult - No One Said It Would Be Easy

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