Monthly Archives: December 2007

Albums I Did NOT Buy in 20062007 [doh!].

Posted on by

But am now planning on at least checking out due to their proliferance on other people’s year-end lists (or specific comments on the lists of people whose other choices I am down with, even where they differ from me). (Largehearted Boy has a huge list of links to people’s lists. Fun, fun!)

  • Bat for Lashes “Fur & Gold”
  • Burial “Untrue”
  • Justice “[cross]”
  • The Field “From Here We Go Sublime” (‘quiet is the new loud’ / minimal techno)
  • Animal Collective “Strawberry Jam”
  • Jens Lekman “Night Falls Over Kortedala”
  • Smashing Pumpkins “Zeigeist”
  • Bowerbirds “Hymns for a Dark Horse”
  • White Rabbits “Fort Nightly”
  • Clorox Girls “J’aime Les Filles”
  • Caribou “Andorra”
  • Mavis Staples “We’ll Never Turn Back”
  • Jarvis Cocker “Jarvis”
  • Miranda Lambert “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”
  • Avett Brothers “Emotionalism”
  • The Perishers “Victorius”
  • The Octopus Project “Hello, Avalanche”
  • Akron/Family “Rise Above”
  • Moonbabies “Moonbabies at the Ballroom”
  • Franklel (Michael Orendy) “Lullaby for the Passerby”
  • Lucy Wainwright Roche “8 Songs”
  • Wintersleep “Welcome to the Night”
  • The Cobbs “The Deathcapades”
  • Vampire Weekend
  • Au Revoir Simone

Already bought based on others’ lists:
Brother Ali “The Undisputed Truth” (like it!)
Albums/Bands for which I cannot even comprehend the hype (and I’ve even seen these acts live):
Battles
St. Vincent
Deerhunter
Surprising Comments:
One review referred to Ben Harper’s “Lifeline” as “tepid.” (But another had it #1.) You know I don’t think there’s anything tepid about that boy.
Hilarious reviews:
This dude’s take on Rufus Wainwright’s “Judy Does Carniegie Hall” is hilarious.
The comment that “Young Folks” made whistling cool again. “And we mean cool as in annoying.”
Great way to start a year-end list:
We’re already at the end of another godforsaken year…

Selected Sampler Singles – Paste #36

Posted on by

New (to me) Songs/Artists I’m Diggin:
“A Sunday Smile” Beirut (1)
“Goes Around” Rockfour
“The Ritz” Office
“Eyes Like a Levee” Johnny Irion (2)
“Snakebit” Mary Gauthier
“Rise” (acoustic) Will Dailey
“You’re a Wolf” Sea Wolf (3)
“Civil Twilight” the Weatherthans
New (4) Songs by Old Friends:
“Scar That Never Heals” Jeremy Fisher (5)
“One Crowded Hour” Augie March (6)
“Time Is a Lion” Joe Henry
from Paste #36.
1-Old news, right? People kept mentioning Beirut to me but I never got
around to checking him out.
2-Wow! Love it!
3-Rambles along, I like how it picks up toward the end.
4-Or new when the magazine came out…months ago! 🙂
5-Got this ages ago from Fuel/Friends. Love it.
6-Australians, picked up an older album of theirs on Mariko’s and my trip.

Self-fulfilling prophecies.

Posted on by

“I used to write really shitty, gloomy songs about how everything sucked,” he says, “but I realized that everything sucked because I wrote those songs. My music controlled me much more than I controlled my music.”

–Jens Lekman, as interviewed by Austin L. Ray, in Paste #37.

No present without the past.

Posted on by

I’d like to say that I’ve lived from this moment on without regret, but what makes a life worth living are the small calamities and the train wrecks we live through; a scar becomes a story of endurance.
–Tod Goldberg, from the story “Myths of Our Time” in the collection “Simplify”

À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…

Posted on by

Making: A second Curious George quilt as well as another stripe-y baby quilt. Yadda yadda.
Reading: Short stories by infamous blogger Tod Golberg: “Simplify”. They’re good. As witty and sarcastic as you would have guessed, but more tender than I expected.
Watching: Catching up on TV I was too lazy to watch last week (you know, the ones I don’t HAVE to watch that night when I get home: DS$, Reaper, Gossip Girl), season two of How I Met Your Mother after Michelle got me totally addicted and we whipped through all of Season 1 while she was here, and re(re)watching earlier episodes from the current seasons of Bones and FNL. New (random) episode of The Closer on tonight! Yay! Really want to see both August Rush and Juno (opens tomorrow!) this week.
Listening: To the new Radiohead “In Rainbows”. Yes, I broke down and bought it after Paul said it’s all he’s listened to in two weeks and then it started popping up on everyone’s year-end lists. I haven’t listened to Radiohead in YEARS but I do find this “listenable” which is more than I could say for their last few albums. Also finally bought Augie March “Moo, You Bloody Choir” (it was out in Australia when we went but I had bought an older album instead at the time) and Brother Ali “The Undisputed Truth” (yay! needed some new rap).

Mystery: “True Evil” by Greg Iles

Posted on by

You know when something in a book can just creep you out so much because you don’t know whether it’s something the author just dreamed up out of nowhere or if he’s read about it and the ability to do that horrible thing is actually out there right now in the real world and could be happening to people? And I’m not talking “horrible thing” like something in a crazy horror/ slasher/ murder flick. I’m talking subtly yicky yicky mentally-disturbing “what if people are really doing that?” horrible. And it’s not the part about hiring someone to kill off your spouse instead of you going through a divorce. I’ve still kinda got the skeeves. But that’s really why you read a book like this one: to get your scary kicks.

Mystery: “Deal Breaker” by Harlan Coben

Posted on by

Not your typical genre piece in that the main character is a sports agent rather than a PI, or retired cop, or former FBI agent or whathaveyou. Yet your typical genre piece with the “tougher than the main dude” sidekick (think Joe Pike in the Elvis Cole books). Some really yicky aspects to the mystery. Still: very enjoyable, lots of sarcastic witty humor. Already bought the second one.