dan deacon all weekend

the greatest thing about dan deacon’s music (listen to the crystal cat)is that he chooses lyrics for his human parts phonetically, without regard for literal meaning. bands use cadence and alliteration all the time but it’s such a breath of fresh air to make up your own meaning for strings of syllables. i like the unpretentiousness of assuming the human voice is no better or worse than any other instrument. no, i am not seeing red these days. i’m just kind of fed up with everyone’s self-importance. but deacon gives off none of that and the more i keep hearing from the baltimore scene (jones, etc.) the more i like. here’s an excerpt from a great interview:

Anyway, another thing I was interested in was your transition to pop music from more free form experimental stuff. What is it that interests you about pop?

I grew up listening to the Beatles and Kinks and Led Zeppelin and stuff like that. I think pop is the music of our century and I think it would be foolish to shy away from it. It's just the most fun, and my last couple albums were a much more diverse mix of arrhythmic noise pieces mixed with strange pop pieces, and after I started touring I began enjoying the more rhythmic stuff and I sort of went into it head first and that's what I've been focusing on for a while. I mean, a band like Arab on the Radar is like a pop band but they're extremely musically violent and dissonant, even though the root of their stuff is pop, same thing as Lightning Bolt. I think that is the most innovative music can be, taking something that isn't very accessible and making it accessible, I think that's really important.

It's interesting that you say that because if you compare a Lightning Bolt show to a Shins show, for example, people move and react at a Lightning Bolt show in a way that is both more utilitarian and primal, and it's as if people have a much stronger and more important reaction and connection to stuff like Lightning Bolt, even though it's much more strange and unpredictable than a Shins show, where people don't seem to care as much.

Yeah, I also think there are obviously many different backgrounds in the audience of the independent music scene these days, and mostly it comes out of punk, ska and indie. And I think the hardcore punk and ska crowd got used to going to shows when they were kids in high school and freaking out, and I think that generation is now in this realm of discovering a new type of pop. That's the scene I came up in. I grew up on Long Island and all that was there were shows in Churches and VFW halls and kids would go just to go as crazy as they could, and then those kids went to college and saw kids just standing around at shows and it was boring as fuck. Why would anyone want to go to shows like this? Then you started seeing more weird rock bands that came through and had that dance element incorporated into them, like early Rapture back when they were much more weird and a lot less slick. Then you see a band like the Locust and Lightning Bolt, and for the live atmosphere, audience is such an important part of the show. If the audience sucks, then the show sucks.

east weekend

this past weekend was spent in the east. that is, of course, relative only to where i usually lay my head. for others it would be north. for a select few, perhaps, it would be purgatory. it was thirty six degrees (c) with what i can only describe as tea-kettle-like humidity, but the town wore it well. it was most pleasant long after the sun set and it was warm well into the darkness. i sat outside at places with fountains and string lights and vegetation. i mixed sweet drinks with bitter ones. during the day i bought a lamp made of cow skin and a couple records at a great store. i even found phil collins’ no jacket required for four dollars. it is a shame that i am not victor ward now lives in the land of spittoons and confederate flags because one of his old dwellings was pretty close to where i was. it would have been fun to hang out. if he could’ve gotten permission, of course.

lasting

this feels strange, though not in the way you would imagine. while i have essentially assumed a guest role in an arena previously (and much more prominently) occupied by my very same person, there is another issue with much more at stake. it's nice to be here.

for the first time, and at a point that coincided with the writing of this post, i viewed myself through a very incorrect vantage point. think misinterpretation meets re-evaluation, or better yet...the unfamiliar world of lacking information. i saw a person completely changed by a specific series of events, a level of interest manipulated by more than time, and the fear of consequence that follows. i thought to myself, "change, damn it, change." revert back. cycle through. rise above or duck below. but perception fades with truth, doesn't it? don't we all learn to accept the here, the now, the never will be? the scene has not influenced the protagonist. i'm three steps ahead, and that fits the script as well.

the south is nice, and by nice i mean overly heated. certain aspects of my life can currently be categorized as approximations, but i lack the time to adjust. my decisions may now be labeled as joint, but the outcomes have remained largely unchanged. i bought the very best television on the market a few weeks ago, just because i could. large amounts of humidity have the ability to change lives. i'm thinking of unsubscribing to what it's accomplishing, baby. price wrote a piece that referenced his own marriage. unsuspecting fiction is the new storytelling.

we'll talk soon. >ciao<

newman's wedding

this new york magazine article about a.c. newman and the new pornographers is short and good. so read the whole thing. however, i just wanted to comment on how newman, who is one of my indirect heroes (he is looked up to by matt pond, whom i look up to), has stolen my wedding idea. not that i ever really discussed this idea out loud or with another human, but i’d always wanted to have mates of state play at the fictional event. doesn’t a married indie rock couple seem like the perfect wedding band? not only is their aesthetic vibe right, they have both slow and fast-tempo songs (a must). and they probably don’t play poultry dance songs in which people make arm-wings. that’s a huge concern as well.

minus the bear: planet of ice

planet of ice is more of the same from the boys. that is not to say it is tired or sub-par. i was just kind of hoping for a revival of the sound from the this is what i know about being gigantic and highly refined pirates era. perhaps i’m just nostalgic for college, but i find the new album sonically very similar to their last album rather than the early stuff. they’ve always had dreamy, atmospheric vibes mixed in with their flawless technical precision, but i think the overall tempo of the last two albums has slowed down. i’d like to hear more walkmen-like drumming and quick staccato guitar instead of dreamy-long wailing. of course, though i may sound like a petulant child, i assure you i already like the album and have been spinning it nonstop since i got it. standout tracks after a couple listens are “ice monster”(thanks themilklounge!) and “throwing shapes”. the former’s chorus is just spectacular and the latter’s theme and pacing recalls “pachuca sunrise” and the best yacht-wine-stars rock of pirates.

the new real o.c.

mtv hit black gold with newport beach, the new california-based scripted reality. not only did they find kids who seem to be more at ease in front of the camera than the laguna has-beens, but they also found a better looking overall cast. the narrator is chrissy, a blondish girl with julia roberts-like teeth and overprotective parents. the way she says “daddy” every two seconds on the phone is downright hypnotic. then there are clay, grant, chase, allie, and taylor. all of them look pretty good so i wouldn’t be surprised to see any two of them together. in the first episode we actually get to see rich high school kids not look bored all the time. this show kind of makes me feel like i might have wasted my high school days solving differential equations instead of lifting every day and partying every night.

cassette

my recent reminiscing about junior high school days led me to rediscover some old cassette tapes that had been gathering dust in my attic for a while. most are compilation tapes (some dating back to 1989) containing white rap, electronic dance, and phil collins. the later tapes have some alt-rock and metal from the age of flannel. but i also found a few tapes of comedic observations that were put together in the nineties. after burning them, i reflected back on the joy of recording within the medium of the audio cassette tape. it was much more time-consuming and fun to make a compilation tape back then than it is to drag and drop and burn a mix today. it took skills to get the volume, timing, and dubbing just right. i lamented that the cassette was quickly vanishing into pop history. but then i noticed this article and took heart; it seems the tape will be around for some years to come. due to the library of congress (books on tape for the blind) and religious nuts (sermons on tape) it appears the minute current demand won’t be fading soon. and that’s’ good news for people who want to stay relevant but still listen to black box tracks on magnetic tape.

boh in pgh

band of horses, that mostly mellow, sometimes-piercing band from south carolina made their first appearance in pittsburgh last night. even though the show started late i was happy. besides, it gave me more time to down budweisers on the balcony at diesel. the crowd was not-too-big and not-too-small all at once. it was loud enough to be polite to the bands but sparse enough that i wasn’t forced to smell anyone’s back. love as laughter opened. they were mediocre as a straightforward rock trio. i must confess i didn’t listen to most of the set, as i was too busy having a discussion about old friends and drug use in philadelphia. band of horses lost no time getting into their set. they played a couple new songs from the upcoming album and a couple covers, but mostly songs from everything all the time. ben’s voice live is just like it is on the record. at times it was scary how much the band sounded like my morning jacket. i was delighted when they played “na”, which is my favorite boh song. it sounded like floating down a river. with a straw hat. and it was nice.

kavalier and clay

i finished reading the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay yesterday. it is a well-written historical fiction novel in which michael chabon, the author, deals with themes prevalent in his earlier works. loss, sexual identity, and estrangement were corners in the foundation for wonderboys and the mysteries of pittsburgh as well. i had trouble getting through the last section. it read like a horror story to me. the call of duty, routine above freedom is, in my mind, one of the stages of hell. needless to say the story affected me and i consider that to be the mark of a great novel. the writing style is familiar to any chabon reader but, in my opinion, the run on sentences and liberal use of the comma and hyphen detracted from the book, which, i think -- nay i know – was not as good as mysteries. yes, this novel won the pulitzer prize and mysteries is considered a poor-man’s catcher in the rye. but both the sentences themselves and their content are sharper and fresher in the latter. when i win the pulitzer i shall set this straight during my speech.

age old question

why does diet mug rootbeer taste so much worse than diet a&w root beer? according to the labels they both contain the same ingredients in basically the same ratios. fuck the time machine i'm working on. i need to know the answer to this first.