Music

Interpol in a nutshell, from Salon Audiophile column:

It's not deadpan -- almost the opposite, really -- it's so intense, so stylized, and so inhumanly consistent that the effect is numbing, a blank. It's a nifty trick: using an excess of emotion to project none at all.

Is there any other band that embodies the city experience more than Interpol?

My favorite song so far on Belle & Sebastian's new album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" is "Piazza, New York Catcher," which has this gem of a verse:

San Francisco�s calling us, the Giants and Mets will play

Piazza, New York catcher, are you straight or are you gay?

We hung about the stadium, we�ve got no place to stay

We hung about the tenderloin and tenderly you tell

About the saddest book you ever read

It always makes you cry

The statue�s crying too and well he may

I've been listening to a lot of Rainer Maria lately, thanks to Emusic, the Wisconsin/NY band named after Rainer Maria Rilke, the modernist poet. They're pleasantly noisy, melodic, and a littly whiny, but not annoyingly so.

So far, my favorite album is A Better Version of Me, the album's title taken from the best song on the album, "Hell + High Water." The lyrics are about either the future girlfriend of the lead singer's ex, or her alter-ego:

"I've seen the girl who'll chew up what I bite off
she's devising a better mouth just to kiss you..."

Good stuff.

Yo La Tengo played at the Fillmore last night. On the whole, it was a pretty good concert, but their first two songs ("Night Falls on Hoboken," Sun Ra's "Nuclear War") were so long and, to me, uninteresting it killed a lot of the crowd's energy.

They still played a good two hours, and did "Tom Courtenay," one of my favorite songs.

I saw the New Pornographers play up in SF on Tuesday, and it was a really good show. They played for almost two hours, did two encores, and at one point had an entire shadow-band from the crowd air-playing along with them onstage, making it both a rock show and a parody of a rock show. Hilarious, as was their attempt of a Journey cover.

An altogether crappy work day has been bearable due to the greatness of the latest New Pornographer's album, Electric Version.

They'll be in San Francisco next Monday and Tuesday at Bimbo's 365.

I've been listening to a lot of Stephin Merritt lately, the somewhat mercurial man behind the Magnetic Fields, The Future Bible Heroes, and some other bands.

I had listened to the three volumes of 69 Love Songs, a set of three Magnetic Fields albums that Merritt originally imagined as a sort of cabaret performance. The songs, obviously, are all love longs, but display a lot of wit, humor, and feeling. I've only recently begun to really listen to his other Magnetic Fields albums, though.

Holiday and The Charm of the Highway Strip, similar to 69 Love Songs, are collections of songs about a theme. In the case of Holiday, they're about travel and escape, while The Charm... is about road trips, the open road, and lives in motion.

I've set up a new music archvie at music.techne.net. So far, there's a gigabyte of music, and more coming. Arr, matey.