Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero
I was going to review the latest NIN release, but Fluxblog does it much better. I would have spent too much time talking about The Downward Spiral.
Short Entries
So for some reason, I’ve placed this requirement on myself to post long, sprawling reviews of albums and artists, but what this has done is simply de-motivate me to write on music. Sometimes, I don’t have a long list of reasons filled with personal anecdotes to try and get you to listen to something; sometimes I just want you to listen to the music because it’s fucking great.
So. With that in mind, I’ve put together a short-form post that’s going to accomodate a lot of music and styles and bands. And that’s ok.
First off, I’ve been listening to a lot of Eluvium recently, which is sort of light and airy and instrumental. A lot of people liken them to Explosions in the Sky and Tristeza, but Eluvium has much less weight to it. Their latest album is called Copia and is available on iTunes. Along with Elvium, I’ve been listening (while reading) a lot to another band, Tycho, who sound a lot like the Album Leaf with faster beats, also instrumental.
Next up is a band called Blonde Redhead. Interestingly enough, as I’ve started getting to BR’s latest album, 23 (not yet released), the bassist/singer from my band in high-school randomly sent me a MySpace message asking what I’d been up to. In my surprised response, I asked if she had any of our MP3s from back in the day (don’t worry, I won’t subject you to them here), and she sent me 2 full albums’ worth of MP3s. What I came to realize is that Blonde Redhead’s music has the same tentative style, the same frenzied pace, the same, well, color as the music I was trying so hard to make when I was 18. So without further ado, I give you:
Because I’m a terrible music blogger, I didn’t post the very second I learned that Voxtrot is coming out with a new, self-titled LP on May 22. They’re my absolute favorite band, and I selfishly kept the news of their forthcoming first full-length album all to myself. For shame. No longer though, because I give you my favorite track and the first officially-released single:
So there you have it. My first short entry post. Next time, I’ll be talking about The National’s new LP, The Boxer. The photos are from my recent SXSW trip, where I saw Voxtrot play at the Austin City Limits studio.
SXSW 2007 Impressions
I started writing up an entire trip report detailing how every minute of my trip to Austin this year went. But I realized that it didn’t really get to the heart of what I wanted to say. Here’s what I wrote to my team at work to summarize. Khoi Vinh has some great commentary about the mechanism of the conference and I agree completely, so I won’t parrot him here.
South by Southwest Interactive is always a difficult creature to define. On the one hand, it’s a design conference with many rockstar attendees and on the other hand, it’s a development conference with strong ties to the technology and the social concerns that serve as an undercurrent to every interface alive on the web at any given time. SXSW serves as a sort of social barometer, a finger on the pulse of what is happening, and it changes year to year.
The first time I attended was in 2005 and the concept of the day was social networking, something that in 2007 WSOD’s clients are just now beginning to ask about. “How can we get on this whole social networking boat?” they seem to be asking us, and that boat was first launched in Austin, TX in 2005.
Social networking is just an example of the trends and themes that SXSW has and will continue to explore, but it stands out as a pointer to what SXSW is and tries every year to be: a place for the best and brightest of the web to gather in a relaxed atmosphere and put their heads together to figure out where the internet is headed, on a visual level, a technological level as well as a less tangible conceptual level.
What this means of course is that specific takeaways are hard to define; bullet points are difficult to put together in any meaningful way that will accurately represent the feeling one has on the flight home after 5 days of being inundated with new and interesting ideas.
That’s what SXSW provides you: a subtle shift in how you see the mechanism of the web, an excitement in what is possible, an awe for what happens when tags and images and code work together to create something more.
To best describe SXSW 2007 to someone who’s never attended, though, I’d have to settle on the following lessons:
+ Listen to your users! They’re important and they know what they want better than you do. Most of the time. There was much discussion around the documentation phenomenon and whether the abundance of proof provided to a client prior to any design taking place was an accurate way of designing for a medium that is fluid. Does more up-front documentation proving your idea is worth you client’s dollars make us less likely to try different solutions? Do we become so highly sensitive to critique when we’ve worked up personas and wireframes and use cases detailing why our idea is the greatest idea ever that we refuse to admit that it might be completely wrong? When does a designer’s “intuition” come into play?
+ The strongest web firms in the country are made up of people who were referred to as “generalists,” designers who understand and can write code, and developers who understand the kind of detail a designer puts into their work and who can respect and accurately represent this in their code. No one is advocating that everyone be able to absolutely everything, but having the gap overlap is crucial to success in the marketplace of web design/development. This dovetails nicely with point #1 above, and reinforced to me that WSOD is doing things the best way possible by removing the step of a specialized IA who gives wireframes to a designer who simply styles them. We had many conversations detailing exactly what level our designers delved into the data and cared about the data structure and goals before even starting design. This raised some eyebrows and impressed people that the designers here care as much about the data and information architecture as we do about the colors, type, layout, etc.
+ Design is life. There is no 9-5 if you’re a designer and keeping a strong stable of inspiration from which to draw is key to keeping the well of creativity overflowing. There was a distinct line drawn between being inspired by something and being influenced by something.. The former being the higher road to take as the latter ends up in copying superficial stylistic embellishments while missing the deeper meaning of the original influential piece. The idea of really doing your research before beginning a design project can greatly enhance the visual appeal of it because you’ve understood the structure and the history of everything going into what you’re producing, allowing you to follow the trail to the right decisions that are deeply linked to what you’re designing, not just choosing a typeface or graphical style because “it looks nice” or “it’s what’s hot right now.”
+ Something to keep in mind for the decades ahead: today’s teens growing up on the internet have a much more open mind to what constitutes privacy. There’s a generation who see the idea of blogging your everyday life as immensely anti-personal and as having a complete lack of self-respect or control. But the reality is that the generation younger than the current blog generation are blogging and networking socially in a much more open manner; everything about them is displayed on myspace for the world to see. Very little is kept behind a locked – or even closed – door. How will this influence web-based investing tools in 10, 15, 20 years down the road? What will this generation of investors require of us, and will they request it from us at younger ages? And at quicker intervals?
+ Agile development is really only possible if every member of the team is committed to it, and if the entire team is located in the same space. We won’t be able to move teams to any agile process until the project manager, account manager, SQL developer, etc. all reside in the same small space. This will be a challenge for WSOD.
+ When building a team, there needs to be a part of this team segmented off from doing client work whose sole goal is to focus on the future of the team and the future of the company, otherwise no one will have the time to do so, and the vision will falter, resulting in a higher turnover. Perhaps use more junior-level team members to take the quick-hit projects that require a high concentration of short-term focus to accomplish something, while leaving the senior people to focus on the bigger picture. When attempting to keep a team inspired, the team leaders must be inspiring. This sounds so basic as to not even be worth writing down but it has hidden meaning and is difficult to pull off. “Whining ruins the brand of your team.”
Stalled.
I just got back from SXSW and I have to say I’m tremendously disappointed in my lack of commitment to this blog.
I’ve been working a lot and on some important things, so my time’s been taken up entirely by work and my family. Plus, not having internet at home makes it a little harder to spend time blogging interesting things.
But I’ll try. I promise. New music coming soon, I swear. In the meanwhile, check out the new photos in the sidebar.
Top 10 for 2006
In order to celebrate my first end-of-the-year as a music blogger, I’m doing the honorable thing and creating a top 10 list for 2006.
I know. Totally original and totally unheard-of. I bet you won’t see any of these albums on anyone else’s lists, either. I’ve even included an album from late 2005. If that’s not “indie” then I don’t know what is.
- 10. Aereogramme – My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not Go (2007)
- 9. The Decemberists – The Crane Wife – Yankee Bayonet
- 8. Joanna Newsome – Ys – Cosmia
- 7. Beirut – Gulag Orkestar
- 6. Midlake – The Trials of Van Occupanther – Head Home
- 5. Sound Team – Movie Monster – Head Home
- 4. The Long Winters – Putting The Days To Bed – Rich Wife
- 3. Mew – The Zookeeper’s Boy EP – Am I Wry? No.
- 2. Tristeza – A Colores (2005) – Balabaristas
- 1. Voxtrot – Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives EP – Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives
PS: I was going to include links to a song from each album, but since EZArchive is fuxxored and totally useless now, I’ll have to figure something else out.
PPS: Dammit. I guess the Aereogramme album isn’t out until 2007. Guess I’m going to have to re-work this list…
Rodrigo y Gabriela
Kottke recently quickly mentioned Rodrigo y Gabriela playing at PopTech 2006 and that reminded me that I’d wanted to post about them for awhile. Calling them metal-influenced flamenco/classical guitar doesn’t do them justice but just think for a second about how boring it usually is when it’s done the other way around. Here are a couple of my favorites:
(BTW, EZArchive is changng over to version 3.0 or something lame like that soon, so if these links go down, I’ll have to update them to point to the new system.)
We'll nurture xenophobia
When I was first introduced to Rogue Wave, I got really, really excited about them after hearing the first two tracks from Descended Like Vultures, Bird on a Wire and Publish My Love. I mean like, really, ridiculously excited. And then as the album went forward, I kind of lost concentration. But in those first few minutes I told myself I was going to get everything I could by Rogue Wave, and I did.
And was terribly disappointed. “It’s all mediocre acoustic?” I thought to myself, and haven’t really listened much since. Bird on a Wire and Publish My Love have something to them though, don’t they? Nevermind that the latter was featured on an OC soundtrack or something; it’s really got punch, and I’ve been looking for a replacement for a long time.
In my last post, I mentioned (albeit briefly) Mew, in reference to what they have in common with Jeremy Enigk. This was before I bought Mew’s entire discography and discovered they’ve been around since fucking 1997. I have been pretty much listening to them nonstop, and it was only a couple days ago when I realized why: Mew embodies everything I wanted Rogue Wave to be, and then some. There’s this energy, this sound that just kills me. It’s ridiculously unpredictable and entirely enthralling.
Here’s the thing though: comparing them to Rogue Wave and Jeremy Enigk actually doesn’t really do them much justice, because that’s just a surface comparison. There’s an undercurrent of something that I can’t quite put my finger on flowing through everything that gives Mew an urgency and an ethos that’s elusive and exciting. Let’s put it this way: I needed this band to come along right now, and the fact that I stumbled upon them right at this moment makes me ridiculously happy.
And besides the references to other bands above, I’ve just realized that I haven’t even talked about what they sound like. This is difficult because there are so many different things going on in each song. There’s tremendous song-writing talent in Mew and their songs do not stand still long enough to be easily dissected, categorized and defined. The words flowing through my head right now are: wide, gentle, subtle, twirly, driving, open.
Imagine taking everything Rogue Wave, Smashing Pumpkins, Sunny Day Real Estate and Deathcab for Cutie could be but don’t have the balls to be, and rolling them all up into one.
Buy everything you can by Mew on iTunes, right fucking now.
Update: Pitchfork does a better job of explaining Mew than I ever could. Also, I remembered something I wanted to mention when I first wrote this: if you were ever a reader of The Letters of Gary Benchley, Rock Star, Mew essentially sound what ostensibly Schizopolis was supposed to be, only Mew uses guitar.
I wanna see it explode
By reading this blog, and this post in particular, you’d probably get the feeling that I have some kind of deep love for Sunny Day Real Estate, but the reality is, I totally don’t. I obsessed about Diary for the length of exactly one summer – one which happened to be like 8 years after the album’s release.
I could never get intrigued by the whole “the singer’s christian and he’s breaking up the band but now he’s not anymore and the band is back together but only kind of and this time they’re calling it The Fire Theft” thing. It never interested me. Also, The Fire Theft never interested me. I like the first track OK but it never grabbed hold.
You know that feeling I’m talking about when by all logic and reason, this album that you’re listening to should be like the second fucking coming of Christ, but really, you can take it or leave it? That’s been The Fire Theft for me and so when I had a chance to listen to and review a new solo album from Jeremy Enigk, the lead singer from Sunny Day Real Estate/The Fire Theft, I approached it with weary trepidation. After all, I’m not that big of an SDRE fan (even though I feel like I should be, and I’ve mentioned them a disproportionate number of times here) and the latest stuff from that direction seemed kind of, well, blah to me.
And then when the first few fading seconds of A New Beginning (the first track on World Waits, Jeremy Enigk’s second solo album) gave way to sweeping orchestral excellence and that building-drum sound you have to love so much – and the bells! There’s fucking bells! Anyway, when this musical knockout hits the kind of crescendo you don’t think you can live through without either breaking into tears or a gigantic smile, it stops. Everything fades away as quickly as it starts, and you’re treated to the beginning arpeggio of the next track. No (worded) vocals, no chorus, no singable hook, just a fucking musical smack to the face. You can feel it in your stomach when the whole thing hits, provided your headphones are turned up loud enough (as mine so often are).
And I would totally share that with you. I would give you that experience, except… Well, except then you’d need the entire album. You can’t start out with a track like this and not want to go all the way through. And since I can’t give you every track on this EP (well, 10 tracks, but it clocks in at a svelte 36.4 minutes), what I’ll do is this: I’ll give you track number 4, “City Tonight,” which can be taken on its own and enjoyed and should give you a good feel for what’s different here from just about anything else I’ve heard Jeremy record.
And then, because I’m nice, I’m going to pair that song with one by a lesser-known band, Mew, because they do a similar type thing as Jeremy, except they’re actually a little more a) indie and b) hummable.
Buy Jeremy Enigk’s prior album, The Frog Queen on iTunes
Buy Mew’s And The Glass Handed Kiss from iTunes
Flickr Photo Credit
Clap Your Hands if You Want Some More
Yes. It’s been a long fucking time since I’ve posted. I’ve been busy, and hey – I went to Vegas, so that’s gotta count for something, right?
Any-dang-way, I’ve decided (yes, all by myself) that the newest thing is going to be retro 60s music instead of retro 80s. Think about it. The sound has stood the test of time for way longer than 80s synths and wacky hairdos and tight jeans have, the dancing is awesome, and it escapes the bullshit, short-term-novelty of kinda sorta reliving something that you remember from when you were 8, but were actually in fact too into GI Joe and your BMX bike to properly remember and understand why it’s gone.
At any rate, the purpose of my rambling is that I’ve become enamored recently with The Pipettes and their combination of retro-60s kitsch and 2006 indie-chick attitude. I can’t get enough of “Pull Shapes” from their latest album “We Are The Pipettes.” I have to admit that some of that comes from the video (available here on Videoteque) but something about the line “I just want to move, I don’t care what the song’s about” just makes me giddy. Watch the video for the killer pose at the very end.
Sure, there are advantages to recording 60’s-style music in 2006 — such as higher production value and the subtle record-scratching effect used in at about a minute in — but the energy of the music is pure 1964. As a bonus, I’m including a track by Young and Sexy, which if it wasn’t recorded in stereo could almost pass as having been produced in the decade I’ve already mentioned too many times in this post to repeat.
- The Pipettes – Pull Shapes
- The Pipettes – Pull Shapes (iPod-ready video at Videoteque)
- Young and Sexy – Conventional Lullabies
Buy The Pipettes on iTunes
Buy Young and Sexy on iTunes
Oh, and thanks to this random Flickr user for the photograph. If so desired, I’ll take it down.
Upcoming Denver Shows
I know that 3 out of the 4 readers of this blog are in Denver, so I’ll just leave Phil out and post about how two previously posted-about bands are going to be in Denver in the next few weeks, both at the Hi-Dive, Denver’s – and parents of kids at Steele Elementary’s – favorite indie kid dive bar.
I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness will be playing on May 30, while Voxtrot will be playing on June 3. So if you live in Denver and you want to be cool, then come buy me a drink or twelve on both of these nights.
I also just want to point out that the home page here is officially completely made up of music-related posts. Yay! And only one Mac-related one! Did you ever think you’d see the day? I know, me neither.