Music, v. 2015
Listening, playing, performing, composing.
Continued from v. 2014
Date: January 12, 2015
Categories: Articles and Posts by MBers, Life, The Universe, Things We like
Saturday, 27 April 2024
Life, the universe, pies, hot-pink bunnies, world domination, and everything
Listening, playing, performing, composing.
Continued from v. 2014
Date: January 12, 2015
Categories: Articles and Posts by MBers, Life, The Universe, Things We like
I’m going to see Hurray For The Riff Raff in Portland on March 22nd and I am excited! It’s been great to see them mentioned on so many “best of 2014” lists. Y’all should listen to their song “The Body Electric”, it’s beautiful.
New Decemberists album!!!! And since today was officially declared Decemberists Day in Portland, I decided to participate in the festivities, despite being on the other side of the state. For the first hour of my radio show I played the new album (which is a great way to listen to an album for the first time, I discovered), and the second half of the show was an assortment of Decemberists songs.
I suppose the only thing that could make it better is if they’d released it in their namesake month.
Happy song recommendations for when you could be feeling a whole lot better than you feel today:
1985 (Bowling For Soup)
Accidentally In Love (Counting Crows)
Birdhouse In Your Soul (They Might Be Giants)
Harlem (New Politics)
I Wanna Get Better (Bleachers)
I Want You Back (Jackson 5)
Sell Out (Reel Big Fish)
Shut Up And Dance (Walk The Moon)
The Middle (Jimmy Eat World)
Uptown Girl (Billy Joel)
Wake Me Up Before You Go Go (Wham)
Happy:
Hot Air Balloon (Owl City)
Invisible and Beautiful Day (U2)
Funny:
Crazy ABCs (Barenaked Ladies)
King of Spain (Moxy Fruvous)
Hmm, all of my posts seem to be getting squidded lately. Is the person who was doing it to Piggy still after me for sticking up for him?
…Was this a thing? A couple of posts I’ve made have gotten isolated squids that didn’t make sense in context recently, but I wasn’t even active at the time of Pigsquidgate or whatever the incident was.
I’m pretty sure isolated squids are either someone accidentally pressing the squid, or disagreeing with something you said in the post. I only see a squid on your music post, KaiYves. Maybe someone just doesn’t like one of those songs, or has clumsy thumbs on a smartphone. Or maybe it is one of Jade’s kinfolk, gently waving its tentacles on the path through the grand abyss.
Oh look! Another of Jade’s squid kind!
GREETINGS FELLOW SQUID
I WELCOME YOUR PRESENCE
IN THE GLITTERING VOID
INHERENT IN THE SQUID
THERE IS MUCH JOY
I tend to get overexcited about the squid button still & squid any post that mentions cephalopods
(though also from my phone in the comment page I squid things on accident sometimes too whoops)
Happy:
Love Today–MIKA
Elle me dit–MIKA
Big Girl (You are Beautiful)–MIKA
Ooh Child (Things are gonna get easier)–Five Stairsteps
Amsterdam–Guster
No Stopping Us (Live at the Eagles Ballroom)–Jason Mraz
I Know My Love–The Chieftans/The Corrs
Happy:
Thunder – Passenger
Coast (It’s Gonna Get Better) – Patrick Stump
Mountain Sound – Of Monsters And Men
Shake It Off – Taylor Swift (sorry not sorry)
Everything Is Awesome – Tegan And Sara/ The Lonely Island
Dog Days Are Over – Florence + The Machine
Song For Myla Goldberg – The Decemberists
I Don’t Care – Fall Out Boy
Glow – Retro Stefson
Closer To Fine – Indigo Girls
Capsule’s new album is coming out soon! I’m very excited. The mega-mix video seems promising, especially “Feel Again.” I also started listening to Coltemönikha recently. “Soratobu Hikari” is my favorite- it’s in Japanese and English at the same time, which is the coolest thing ever. Even if the English lyrics don’t actually make sense and I couldn’t tell what she was saying without seeing them written. (Seriously, “give me no motorway killer killer you make me tight color”?! Amazing.)
In order to mention every possible Yasutaka Nakata-related musical group in one post, since he’s the best, I nominate Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Perfume for happy music recomendations.
Oh yeah- if you guys didn’t already know, Allegra Rosenberg/Kiki the Great is releasing a new EP!
New addiction: Indigo Girls. I’ve loved a few of their songs for some time now (Closer To Fine, Galileo, Kid Fears, most of the self-titled album) but hadn’t listened to much of their other music until today. Come On Now Social is one heck of a good album. I also the song Rise Up from All That We Let In (I haven’t heard the whole album yet, but so far it seems pretty good).
(Also it’s nice to see people other than me posting on this thread)
Have you heard “Hammer and a Nail”? I really like that one.
I have now! I really like the vocal harmony and energy as well as the lyrics! (but really, the vocal harmony part goes for pretty much every Indigo Girls song)
Today’s listening: Noirre, who’s a guy from Sacramento making dream pop with electronic influences and sort of an R&B undertone to a lot of it. I can hear a lot of M83 in it too. He did a stripped down live set of a few of the songs from his first album, Nite Tales, which is how I heard about him. Worth a listen. I can tell he’ll be getting more attention in the future.
I got a cheap copy of Death Cab for Cutie’s album Narrow Stairs a few months ago and I’m embarrassed to admit it fits my sleep-deprivation-addled post-convention-quasi-illness brain perfectly, even the songs I don’t like when I’m in my right mind. I feel like that’s a bad sign. (I’m just thankful I’m not listening to Plans – it reminds me too much of high school, and problems I had then.)
Also we saw the Protomen at MAGfest this year (along with many many video game music cover bands – I think the other ones we went to were Professor Shyguy, Kirby’s Dream Band, Descendants of Errdrick, Triforce Quartet, Bit Brigade, maybe others???). Anyone else have opinions on them? My favorite was the Protomen’s 80s covers set, though I wish they’d played Video Killed The Radio Star I loved many of their other choices (eg Time After Time)
Other than that… trying to decide how many times to see They Might Be Giants in Brooklyn, and when. Leaning towards going to the show Feb. 22 but my 2 free fan club tickets need a month’s advance notice to redeem and I want to wait to start work before I decide to go to the concert, which is only two weeks in advance.
I know this may not be the same for many other residents to this site… but why is it that James Hetfield’s voice can transmit to me every positive emotion with just the beginning of a song?
Our school is doing les mis! I’m in the pit playing trombone!
I wish this thread got more traffic.
upcoming concerts –
march 9th – of Montreal @ Toad’s Place (CT)
april 22nd – Neutral Milk Hotel @ Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel (RI)
no other shows recently because my college friends are all at school.
Going to a photoshoot for Loner Chic’s album release with one of the guitarists from TWIABP next week, they’re shooting an album cover and want extra people for it so they’re throwing a party with a bunch of Yale kids.
taking an audio engineering class at community college, although it’s below my skill level for now. I’m used to working in Ableton Live, not Pro Tools, but learning new software isn’t too challenging. Once the class can work with it pretty well we’re going to start on microphone placement and recording, and I imaging the class will wrap with mixing. Hopefully next semester there’ll be another class that takes it further.
uhhh what else
I play bass for a local band now, but that’s more of an exercise in group practice/performance than anything. I don’t know if I’ll bring any original material to them, although they’ve encouraged me to.
I’ve been doing a lot of photography over the last year but that doesn’t really belong here. Maybe I’ll do a general life update in the random thread.
I recently have had cause to wonder why and how music does what it does. Why do people have such strong emotional reactions to it? (Catwings’s comment higher up about James Hetfield’s voice, for example, and Rainbow Storm’s list of happy songs…)
Let me clarify. It seems to me like some things could plausibly be universal — most people are going to interpret fast music as more energetic and slow music as more sedate, that’s almost tautological. But I’m talking about general tendencies whose causes aren’t obvious (to my layman’s perspective, ofc). Why is it that music in a minor key often seems ominous or sad, while music in a major key often seems happy or triumphant? Is that a cross-cultural phenomenon or is it limited to the European/Western tradition? I’m not sure which would be more surprising to me.
An article I just discovered claims that it’s mostly based on learned associations in Western culture, but some evidence suggests there are universals underlying this phenomenon (subjects from the Mafa tribe in Cameroon couldn’t distinguish happy from sad in Western-cultural songs as easily as, say, Americans, but they still performed better than chance). I’ll link the article if anyone’s interested; I found it with the incredibly sophisticated search string, “why is minor key sad.”
So from my world music class in my last semester: I’m fairly confident it’s just Western culture. There’s some examples of this e.g. Maori chants seem ominous to my ear but not to them, whereas trumpets seem pretty triumphant to me but are signs of war for them. (My world music prof would probably be disappointed in me for not being able to list more examples off the top of my head… the whole class was about cultural differences… but I am still half asleep.)
It’s cultural indoctrination. I remember one of my music history profs talking about how they brought in a (western african?) drummer who played a traditional tune and then asked what the class thought it was – everyone said dance/happy/etc, but it was really one of their most tragic funeral pieces. Most people in the Western world, and through globalization, most places in general, have heard music since before they were born and learned how to react appropriately – it’s like gender, it’s something that’s so pervasive and so subtle that it’s not immediately apparent it’s a learned behavior. Major / minor keys and their associations with happy/sad are also a thing predominantly in Western music – Indian Classical music, for instance, divides the octave very differently – and a fairly recent one at that (~300years). If you listen to a lot of Medieval / Renaissance music (i.e. modal), some of the songs with very happy texts will sound sad to us because they’re in modes with lowered third scale degrees (which read to us as minor): they didn’t have that cultural association at that point.
We even learn how to react to music on more sophisticated levels. For example: a lot of adults who don’t listen to much classical music will feel vaguely uncomfortable / dislike something like a Bartok quartet, but preschoolers absolutely love it. Adults are reacting to the dissonance of the chords, but the preschoolers are reacting to the energy of the performance.
source: five years of and a minor in musicology
(the importance of harmony in how we react to a piece is also a mostly Western thing – and, again, when I say Western I mean post-1700 Western music, not the countries usually thought of as Western, since globalization means pretty much everyone’s heard it. Other culture’s traditional music focuses much more heavily on rhythm, or on varying a melody. Renaissance music derived from relationships between intervals, not from harmonies.)
Not sure how I missed the memo, but I have never heard minor keys as sad. In fact I was genuinely surprised when I found out they were supposed to be — as I learned from a chance comment from my dad, who is a whole-hearted devotee of major keys and non-dissonant music. I’m almost the opposite. Major keys often seem jangly and intrusive to me; minors are uplifting, soul-soothing. Hmm. Just occurred to me that my preferences probably stem from infancy/toddler years of attending services at old-school Episcopal churches where modal music was the norm. (Our church-going destinations usually depended on whether the Navy assigned my dad to sea duty or shore duty. Mom was the Episcopalian.)
Yeah, I don’t tend to think of minor keys as sad either. I have a lot of the same associates as you do, I think, with major keys often seeming jangly and over the top. I’m also used to listening to old-schools church music, so now I’m wondering if there’s a connection.
Something like eight years later, and your “captain’s daughter” remark makes sense to me at last.
The major fall and the minor lift?
Thank you all for your responses. This is a fascinating subject and I didn’t know about most of these examples.
My new project with my music teacher is to take clips from a movie and wipe the sound and re-score them, as a lesson in film scoring. The movie is The Princess Bride. I’m excited!
For all you peeps who like female-fronted bands: Sleater-Kinney’s new album (and back catalog) is pretty sweet. Good, clean punk. Even if the “clean” part probably doesn’t matter to most people. Including me. I don’t know what I’m saying. OFF TO EARLY BED FOR ME
I keep listening to No Cities To Love on youtube. I do really like the album, just haven’t had time to go to a store to get it.
*busts through door* DID YOU SAY FEMALE FRONTED BANDS YES I AM HERE
12 –
that sounds like a cool time. We’ve only talked about it in class, and it was less to do with scoring and more to do with ambient noises and dialogue and the general production quality of the audio, but re-scoring portions The Princess Bride sounds like a ton of fun, I’m sure it’ll go well. Do Inigo and Westley fighting on the clifftop
13/13.2 –
Mitski’s a good female-fronted project, except it’s less of a project and more of her first name. She does a lot of the instrumentation herself and I don’t know what her live setup is like but she sounds like 4 people.
She released an album called Bury Me At Makeout Creek last year and it got a lot of positive response and then a little blurb in Rolling Stone. She’s releasing her next album on Don Giovanni Records, which is host to some other cool female-fronted bands, namely Screaming Females and Laura Stevenson (ex-BTMI!) and her band.
Ahhh, you guys, I just listened to Allegra Rosenberg’s new EP, and it’s so great. (Everybody go listen to it and buy it right now.)
Also, that reminds me: Tally Hall is an amazing band and I love them. Not only is their music so awesome that it defies any kind of coherent description, “Tally Hall’s Internet Show” is the most incredible thing I have ever seen with my own two eyes. It’s really cool to me that they’re from Ann Arbor, because I’ve been there many times. Throughout T.H.I.S. there are many microscopic Michigan-y details which warm my heart (Tally Hall may be in fact the most interesting thing ever to happen in this state). They even interviewed the co-founder of Zingerman’s about the meaning of life in one episode. I need to visit Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum (a real place that they named their first album after) sometime, too.
TALLY HALL. So good. So tragically inactive. I made a pilgrimage to Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum when I was visiting my grandparents in MI for Christmas, apparently my dad went there all the time as a kid (and my grandma used to shop at the Tally Hall shopping mall before it closed!). If/when you do end up going, bring a variety of coins! I only brought quarters and couldn’t operate a bunch of the really cool antique machines which was disappointing.
And their enchirito video is funny enough to make me cry laugh just thinking about it.
My family friend’s band, Innocent Monday, has been #1 on the national indie charts for three weeks in a row and also this is their second week of being #1 on the national rock chart for their song “Cage” off their premiere album Stories from the Garden. Even if you’re not much of a “rock” genre fan, I’d definitely recommend all of you guys to go give them a listen. They’re definitely breaking the mainstream formula of “what makes a good popular song” by bringing influences from across cultures and musical traditions, and their lyrics are all extremely relevant, raw, and emotional. My family friend is the drummer, the vocalist, and writes a majority of their songs as well, and I am super proud of the guys for how much they’ve achieved in the past few weeks. They’re definitely going to get really big really soon, so hey if you go ahead and give them a listen you’ll be able to tell all your friends “Yeah I heard of them before they were really cool, and I have a friend who knows the band personally!” in order to sound super hip.
Recent Music Thoughts:
– The Cash Money/Young Money/Wayne/Drake lawsuit drama has been holding my attention lately. The new Drake pseudo-mixtape that dropped this week has as well. It’s pretty good. Not ground-breaking, but enjoyable to listen to, particularly with the label drama in mind. “You & the 6” makes me want to go hug my mom, so that’s something too.
– My mom bought me an organ accompaniment to the Liber Usualis–a very useful thing to have. There’s a few things I wish it had that it doesn’t (the tonus solemnis of the Te Deum, for instance, and the usual setting of O Salutaris Hostia) but I’ll definitely get a lot of mileage out of it.
– Lately I’ve been wanting to write up something about what I’ve learned about the music industry from my experience moderating a rather large music community on a social networking/link sharing website (“large” meaning north of two million users). It’s given me a lot of insight into how the Big Three record labels work, about astroturfing, about networking, about managers.
– I realized recently that I had tickets to a Shakey Graves show in December that I completely forgot about. Oh well.
I’ve become a huge fan of Ingrid Michaelson! I have some of her older stuff, including one of her first albums, but I thought it all sounded sort of similar. She’s really grown as an artist though — her newest album is absolutely amazing, and the music videos are also excellent. Check out Girls Chase Boys, Time Machine, and Afterlife (my current favorites) for super catchy, upbeat songs that still have a lot of emotion.
My latest musical venture has brought me into the land of American Primitivism. I don’t know enough yet to be able to give a succinct definition, but it’s basically neoclassical and/or avant-garde guitar works using country blues fingerpicking techniques. It’s really, really interesting. Look up Matthew Mullane’s “Once Was Is Once Again” on Youtube.
I just discovered Kishi Bashi last week–he’s incredible. Very Andrew Bird-esque: violin virtuoso, enjoys live looping and beatboxing. And quite the accomplished (and quirky songwriter) as well. Highly recommend.
Lots of hip-hop to keep me busy right now. It’s been a very good few years for hip-hop.
I SAW OF MONTREAL
they were great. Kevin Barnes is my spirit animal.
I did a writeup and photography of their performance for a Brooklyn music website. They’ve listed me as a contributor and will contact promoters and booking agents on my behalf to get me press passes for shows I want to cover, which is REALLY EXCITING. There’s tons of potential for meeting new people and seeing great bands and improving various skills.
19 –
I’m several minutes into the Mullane piece. I love it. Reminds me a little of Nick Drake. I found VDSQ’s website, it’s too bad that Mullane’s is sold out (I say too bad, but I bet he’s thrilled).
20-
Kishi Bashi played a show at The Space last year but I missed it. I do listen to some of his solo work, but I’m mostly aware of him as a touring/session musician for of Montreal.
The one anecdote I have heard about seeing of Montreal live is incredibly blog-inappropriate, so I’ll spare you and instead say that I’m glad you liked it and the website sounds like a pretty fantastic opportunity (& if you want to get me a press pass to TMBG at the Music Hall of Williamsburg…. (the joke is that actually I still have Instant Fan Club tickets to redeem, I’m waiting for the weather to improve because Williamsburg is so inconvenient to mass transit & I’m not walking 10+ blocks in 30 degree weather))
~~I probably shouldn’t have posted this as a reply but it’s too late now~~
I haven’t listened to the new Modest Mouse yet – my partner said they thought it was mediocre at best? I was really excited for it, I’ve been listening to The Moon and Antarctica on the train for the past week or so and I’m seriously running short on music I want to hear when I go through 2+ albums a day on the subway. Might save Strangers to Ourselves for sometime I’m not distracted by the subway, though, for a first listen.
I also FINALLY got a copy of No Cities To Love, a full month+ after I said I would. I got the vinyl because I can’t play CDs anyway and the vinyl came with a download code, and while I’m going for physical artifacts that I can’t play, might as well go for the big pretty ones.
I’m really into Lorde right now. The music really goes with my odious sullen teenager vibe.
Also yesterday I played Run Away by Kanye West on a loop… for like 2 hours straight.
Aaah, I love Lorde, for much the same reason! I saw her in concert last fall, and she’s fantastic live.
Animal Collective is excellent. At first I thought they were a hallucination induced by lack of sleep, but nope, they’re surreal and wonderful no matter what.
21.1 –
My cousin lives in Williamsburg, actually, and the site I write for is Brooklyn-based. In theory, at least, it’s possible.
I am exactly the sort of person to walk 10 blocks to a concert in 30 degree weather. There’s some days where you look at the people crowding the New Haven bus stops and think “I mean…I could also walk.”
23 –
if you like Animal Collective, try digging into Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s solo/collaborative stuff. They’re great. Also, Sufjan Stevens’ album The Age of Adz has some tracks on it that are very reminiscent of something Panda Bear would make. I’d probably pick Strawberry Jam or Feels as my favorite AnCo album.
Does anyone here listen to Beulah or Madlib?
If you do get a press pass for TMBG – use it yourself! Maybe I’ll see you there. Fan club tickets come out of the section reserved for family members and friends, I think, which I imagine is near press. Not that I’m sure it makes a difference if the concert’s general admission.
It’s not even that walking 10 blocks is the problem. It’s that, coming from Queens, to get to Williamsburg in Brooklyn involves changing trains twice, detouring through Manhattan for over an hour, and THEN walking ten blocks… on a Sunday night, when I have work the next morning. I almost never think “well, I could walk”, because between my work and where I live is an hour on the subway, and honestly, I can’t.
woot! posting from my phone…
I also like the Drive By Truckers- has anyone heard of them/listened to them? they`re a southern rock band. they have a lot of songs about southern history & culture, and one called little pony&the great big horse which i really like. also the song days of graduation.
New songs from Indigo Girls and Florence + The Machine!!!!! Happy In The Sorrow Key and Ship To Wreck, respectively. Both are from new albums that are coming out June 2! Then a week after that is Of Monsters And Men’s new album! AND Whispers II by Passenger is coming out the 20th of this month!
new mountain goats album
new mountain goats album
new mountain goats album!!!
new
mountain
goats
album
!
Today I played with my trombone quartet, and we played my trombone quartet arrangement of A Cruel Angel’s Thesis (from Evangelion). I think it went over pretty well! Arranging is fun.
Strangers To Ourselves was mostly an OK album – when I was feeling very depressed the other week I couldn’t stop listening to Ansel and I think it made me feel a little better.
Since then, I’ve {unfortunately, fortunately} been listening to a LOT of blink-182. Their 1999 album, which I perhaps should not name here, is very uneven lyrically, but solid musically, and the lyrical highs are still pretty great (Aliens Exist and Going Away To College probably….. and of course, Adam’s Song, but I almost hesitate to recommend it)
I like their self-titled a lot too, but I already knew that one was good. Though, recently getting the uncensored version does change some of their songs dramatically.
1.) Wolfgun’s album Road to Jupiter came out recently. It’s quite wonderful! My favorite tracks are Hope and Titan.
2.) I’m playing at a jazz competition with my school’s sax quintet. We’re doing Supersax arrangements of Charlie Parker tunes. It’s challenging but fun.
3.) I’m starting a band after months of my guitarist friend and I telling each other “we should start a band”. We recorded a demo at my house and it sounds pretty cool.
I was at Merlefest yesterday and I saw the Two Man Gentlemen Band! Twice! They’re my current favorite. I’ve been super into old-timey swingy jazzy stuff lately.
Excuse me while I cry forever about the new Of Monsters And Men song.
Indigo Girls and Florence + the Machine are both releasing albums on June 2 and OMAM’s is June 9. (Respectively: One Lost Day, How Big How Blue How Beautiful, and Beneath The Skin)
Florence and OMAM’s albums are supposed to be way more personal and emotional than their previous albums, and as a general rule IG’s music is pretty emotional, so if you need me around those times, I’ll be listening to those albums and crying.
Update: One Lost Day and How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful were just as wonderful, if not even better, than I had expected. We’ll see how Beneath The Skin turns out!
Found some unused iTunes gift cards yesterday, and decided to treat myself to some purchases. I bought:
-The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe soundtrack. This is probably my favorite film score ever. Harry Gregorson-Williams is such a good composer.
-The Planets, by Holst. I already had Jupiter on my phone, but I completed the suite.
-The Rite of Spring and The Firebird, by Stravinsky. I found them both for under six dollars, so yay!
-Adagio for Strings, by Samuel Barber. I don’t know why.
Lately I’ve been listening to the Revolutionary Girl Utena soundtrack a lot. It’s one of my favorites (and the anime itself is amazing too- definitely watch it if you haven’t), especially the songs from the duel scenes. I thought the music was very effective as it was used in the show, but I wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy listening to it outside of that. Fortunately, I do. I love Spira Mirabilis Gekijou and Nikutai no Naka no Koseidai particularly.
AMMONITE!
So I’ve started listening to Arctic Monkeys because my…. crush? new friend?… likes them, and so far my ears are pretty happy.
Mingulay Boat Song. Do yourselves a favor and listen to it (Gaelic Storm version is good), you will cry and it will be weirdly pleasant.
I’m not good at writing about music so I’m not going to try and say anything intelligent, but the new Mountain Goats album is so good, y’all. I’m in love. (and I don’t know a single thing about wrestling!)
Which is your favorite? I think the best tracks on that album are “Heel Turn 2,” “Werewolf Gimmick,” and of course “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero.”
all of those! but I also really love “Animal Mask,” “Foreign Object,” and “Choked Out.” (And “Luna.” And “Fire Editorial.”)
Snarky Puppy’s new album is absolutely fantastic!!
I never actually… listened to anything by the Mountain Goats before late last week, i was just kind of… aware of them?
I downloaded This Year on the subway Monday morning and I may have just listened to it on loop since then, no other music, for a cumulative 3ish hours of commuting so far
The Ingrid Michaelson concert was so awesome! Everyone sang along, there was an epic drum solo, she took off her shoes near the end, fun times were had by all.
Three quick recommendations:
She Her Her Hers, Japanese slightly shoegaze
Open Mike Eagle, topical-but-not-heavyhanded underground hip-hop
Joseph Andreoli, experimental post-rock and half of Giraffes? Giraffes!
Checking all of these artists out on youtube.
Got some for you:
Inside Out – No Spiritual Surrender – the only release from Zack de la Rocha’s pre-RATM punk band
Tall Heights – wrenching guitar/cello music with endless harmonies, straight off the streets of Boston (literally)
Mitski – heavy indie rock from a Massachusetts college student
twenty one pilots.
yes.
I need to listen to them more, their lyrics are so real.
“You fell asleep in my
Car, I drove the whole time
But that’s okay, I’ll just avoid the holes so you sleep fine.
I’m driving, here I sit
Cursing my government
For not using my taxes to fill holes with more cement”
i love that part! it messed me up at first because it sounds so different from how it looks. is it just me or does that one bit seem a bit passive-aggressive? “that`s okay, i`ll just avoid the holes so you sleep fine.” everyone seems to interpret tear in my heart as being really sincere, though. the rest of it is, i guess.
also, Josh Dun. it`s really mostly josh dun. he`s at least 50 percent of why i love top
I can’t stop listening to The Con and i know i shouldn’t now on the subway in to work but it’s so good!!!!! So sad but so good.
Oh man The Con is essentially a musical feelings-bomb that i have done a LOT of intense singing-along to.
My one-way commute time is approximately one The Con-length. It’s been an issue, this week. I catch myself humming at work when I’m trying to concentrate on what I’m doing and don’t have room in my head for both whatever song’s stuck there and the code I’m working on.
My favorite songs are The Con, Nineteen, and… probably Soil, Soil, though calling it a “favorite” when it’s so devastating is tricky. But I mean, I could just keep listing, it’s such a good album, every song is good. It might be shorter to list my least favorites: Knife Going In and I Was Married.
I really like Are You Ten Years Ago mostly because of the lyrics ( “When I get so into myself I lose track of where I’m going and lose track of how to get going again” – yes relatable). The Con was one of my favorite songs for a time but in a really painful way. I still like it, I just don’t listen to it much because of feelings that it dredges up. Dark Come Soon is a bit like that too, but not as bad. Again, I still like it, but I have to be careful of emotions.
I really like Call It Off and it doesn’t have any major emotional connections for me so it’s oddly soothing despite being a rather sad song. Like O, Like H is one of my favorites, especially to sing along with. I also really like Hop A Plane for reasons that I cannot place.
I’ve been listening to HAIM lately, at the suggestion of a friend. I have come to the conclusion that Este Haim is everything I want to be in life. Just playing bass in a rad band, wearing red lipstick and making weird faces.
Also: I have been listening to Florence + The Machine’s new album How Big How Blue How Beautiful pretty much every day since it was released. I think I’m addicted.
I LOVE the brass in HBHBHB. It’s my favorite album yet.
I…. read that as HPBHPBHPB and thought of bunnies. Whoops.
I’ve been listening to HAIM lately too.
Tame Impala’s new album is really cool, would recommend.
So since I, as a college-age person, can now post links (and also enjoy attention), here’s a thing I wrote back in February about my experience as a college radio DJ and also just some stuff about music: eou. edu/keol/dj-blog/im-talking-on-the-radio/
SFTDP but I’d like to clarify that the show time given at the bottom of the page is not true, as we are currently in the process of moving into a new studio. However, once classes start I will have a show schedule again and it will be possible to listen via webcast if anyone wants to!
More Japanese shoegazey recommendations: Kinoko Teikoku, Mass of the Fermenting Dregs, and Coaltar of the Deepers. Kinoko is the lightest, Coaltar is the darkest.
Halsey.
That is all.
HALSEY
Does anybody here listen to Martin Carthy? I’ve just found out about him recently and I feel as though I should have been listening to him for years and years. Look up his version of Famous Flower of Serving Men — I didn’t know voices could do things like that, and the images he adds to the song are just as strange and wonderful as anything you’ll find in Child. Utterly enchanting.
The new blink-182 album, “California,” came out yesterday! I am only listening to it for the second time today as I write this, so I can’t pass judgment yet, but I like it, I think, though the best single, “Bored to Death,” was released months ago (and was in fact the catalyst for me preordering the album). I think California shows an emotional maturity from their much earlier work (which, I should hope so), and more importantly a logical progression from their self-titled album – I liked Neighborhoods but it didn’t feel like a blink-182 album so much as another Angels and Airwaves album with a couple interesting word choices. Also I’m a sucker for California’s songs about suburbia after having moved to the big city.
Things I don’t like about the album: it sounds less uniquely like blink, and more like a generic pop punk band, probably because they’ve replaced Tom Delonge with Matt Skiba – which I think was a good choice, but does change the overall tone of the album dramatically. And they haven’t totally grown up, and tbh I’m embarrassed on their behalf that they named a song “Brohemian Rhapsody.”
A couple discussion themes for blink-182’s California:
– “I’m not coming home” as a repeating lyrical theme or as a callback to Natives (on Neighborhoods) or as a concept – you *can’t* go home again, it’s not the same – culminating with the song San Diego
– tracing the relationship arc described in She’s Out Of Her Mind/No Future/Home Is Such A Lonely Place
– the maturity shown in the lyrics of Bored to Death “we’ll pretend that you think I’m the man of your dreams come to life in a dive bar” – on their pre-self-titled albums (which, one at least I’m not sure has a child friendly enough title to name here) I think they wouldn’t be self-aware enough to pretend
I’m not much of a rap person usually but I’ve been listening to Watsky a lot lately. I really like Strong As An Oak, Tiny Glowing Screens Part 2, Sloppy Seconds, and Seizure Boy. And his new album is coming out in August!
I just learned that a couple of days ago, the Avalanches’ second album leaked (it comes out legit on the 8th, I think). The Avalanches’ debut album, Since I Left You, came out back in 2000, and it is a masterpiece. Plunderphonics, dance, turntablism. Everyone was excited to year more from them–but for 16 years, there was nothing. It’s finally here.
It’s good. It’s amazing. It’s psychadelic, it’s chill, it’s happy, it’s bittersweet, it’s catchy, it’s multilayered, it’s dreamy. I saw one person describe it as a record that you could play loud and dance to, or play quiet and fall asleep to.
Oh man.
(In lesser news, I’m going to a show by Ben Caplan and the Casual Smokers in a week or two. Look ’em up, they’re good.)
Any Car Seat Headrest fans here? I’m OBSESSED. I started listening to them I think in August of last year and since then they’ve quickly risen to the title of favorite band. They’re an alt-rock band based in Seattle.
The band name comes from the fact that their frontman Will Toledo (who’s a brilliant, brilliant songwriter) used to park in empty parking lots and record vocals in the back of his car for privacy. He started releasing albums under the name Car Seat Headrest in high school and has since then gotten an actual band and signed onto Matador Records. I reeeeally want to go to one of their shows; I’m trying to make it happen.
Their latest album is called Teens of Denial and it’s really, really good. The self-released albums he wrote before signing onto a label are amazing, too.
Favorite songs:
Vincent
The Ending of Dramamine
The Gun Song
My Boy (Twin Fantasy)
Something Soon
Plane Crash Blues
Broken Birds (Rest in Pieces)
Sober to Death
Has anyone listened to Hadestown by Anaïs Mitchell? It’s a sort of folk opera retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and it’s amazing. I might be biased since that’s my favorite myth, but I listened to it for the first time tonight and I had to stop what I was doing and give my full attention to it. Then I went outside, looked at the stars and smoked a pipe and listened to the coyotes, and then I came back in and listened to the album again. I guess it’s been made into a musical of some kind now too, which I would be very interested in seeing. Mitchell sang one of the songs from it on A Prairie Home Companion tonight, which is how I heard about it.
Definitely tangential to that, but I haven’t heard one of their shows with Thile at the front yet. What did you think of it?
… am also looking into the actual folk opera from this recommendation.
Piggy,
MuseBlog is a long-time Anaïs Mitchell booster, e.g,,
https://musefanpage.com/blog/?p=926#comment-145307
https://musefanpage.com/blog/?p=8477#comment-400830
It’s been thrilling to watch her career take off.
I’ve still never got round to listening to Hadestown, but Mitchell herself is great—I loved that album of Child Ballads that she did with Jefferson Hamer.
“Of A Friday Night” is really good too!
I may have just impulse bought Tegan and Sara tickets for NYC for this weekend. It doesn’t really fit my schedule super well (have to reschedule some other things) but it has been a hard month for me and for both of us and I wanted to do something nice.
Wanted to drop off my endorsement for ‘Roomful of Teeth’ – a self described band of singers rather than choir. They make impressive use of singing unconventional in western music, are ridiculously talented, and sing music a fair bit more consonant than my standards. Good videos are available online (NPR’s tiny desk concert, or Caroline Shaw’s Partita).
Oh, we were just talking about them in one of my composition classes. I’ve heard small snippets of their work and keep meaning to look up more.
The Front Bottoms are a really good indie/folk punk-type band I discovered lately! I like Lipstick Covered Magnet, Jim Bogart, Twin Size Mattress, Bathtub, and Awkward Conversations!
I feel kind of unsophisticated because I’m way more familiar with songs than artists and I don’t really have favorite bands or artists because of that, I can just say that I’ve heard one or several songs by an artist but not sought out their entire discography. The band whose songs I’ve heard and liked the most of is probably U2, but even there, there are many songs by them that I’ve never heard.
That’s totally fine. I sometimes come across as kind of uppity about my music tastes, but honestly there’s no right or wrong way to listen to music, so long as you sincerely enjoy it!
I made a last.fm account at the suggestion of a friend, and I’m quite enjoying the way it catalogs all the music you listen to. My main observation so far is: Wow, I listen to a lot of Car Seat Headrest.
On a related note: Sufjan Stevens, anyone?
As it happens, I have “Decatur, Or, Round Of Applause For Your Stepmother!” stuck in my head at the moment.