Minneseries

So much great music is made by people in bars where there are only 7 people. Why? Right now I'm at the Nomad listening to some incredibly great music by Ghost in the Water, a Fitzgerald side project. I both wish there were more people here and am glad thar it's just the 7 of us: me, Matt Perkins, the members of Unicorn Basement and Lori B., plus a guy who Matt knows who's doing some interperative dance. It's like the music is being made special for you, the way the whole world seemed when you were, say, five. It's everything you'd ever hope for music to be and do.

salon.com's song search

Hey all you independent-minded music people: Salon is running a contest looking for unsigned acts, and I know some of you reading this fit that category. Here's the link:

Salon's Song Search

Normally I think songwriting contests and unsigned talent searches are crap: They inevitably pick the most bland and watered-down stuff because it's the most generally pleasing, and we all know how uninteresting that tends to be. But Audiofile is one of my most favorite music columns out there, so I'm betting this will be better than the usual. Get on it, Twin Citizens.

Tapped out

So yesterday when I posted about that Mars Volta I was a little tapped out, as it was the end of the day on production day and I had just read the review while waiting for my pages to go to the printer, so here's what I forgot to mention: my favorite sentence of the review:

"Now, I dig indulgence when it's done well (see: Finnegans Wake, that skinny guy who wins all the hot-dog eating contests), and what got me through multiple listens to Frances the Mute was the album's overall ludicrousness, that weirdo King Crimson corn-dogging."

Here's what's just brilliantly ridonkulous about it: he manages to join, by the virtue of excessiveness, James Joyce and Takeru Kobayashi. That's the kind of "charter member of the hipster club" card flashing I can appreciate. There's something about his odd choice not to even bother mentioning Kobayashi by name (which, let me tell you, takes about 10 seconds to find on Google) which just screams I care, but I don't; I'm in touch with popular culture, but above it enough to have read Finnegans Wake (which I can absolutely guarantee you he hasn't--no one has). It's just the kind of world-straddling ennui that's apparently a prerequisite for rock writing these days, an "I've seen it all and can tell you when it's good and when it ain't" attitude that just seems faintly ridiculous when you get down to it.

I mean, put Finnegans Wake, a tape of Kobayashi highlights and a copy of the new Mars Volta in a time capsule and tell me that if someone opens it in 100 years they'll find Joyce and Kobayashi equally satisfying and find Mars Volta lacking on some kind of universal scale of over-indulgence.

Enough. I'm listening to a disc by a guy named Charlie Mars, who's supposed to be Southern rock meets U2/Coldplay or something, but really just sounds like James Blunt. I can't really hear the Southern thing going on here at all, at least not when compared to Drive-By Truckers or My Morning Jacket. Hell, he doesn't even sound as Southern as Band of Horses. I'm pretty sure when they recorded this album, they plugged in the machine with the big button that says "Embiggen." It's a perfectly cromulent sutdio technique, I assure you.

In good news, I got a copy of the new Huge Rat Attacks as well, although my office stereo (and I use the term "stereo" loosely--$30 from Best Buy, y'all) apparently hates it and will not play it. It just spins dangerously fast. Maybe those scientists in Switzerland working on that underground particle accelerator would be interested in it.

Savor it

Pitchfork review of the new Mars Volta

Now, I'm a fan of the Mars Volta, and I haven't heard their new disc, so there's every chance in the world I'm not going to like it. And the whole Pitchfork thing's been beaten like a dead horse recently between the City Pages and the Strib. But please, if you will, pause for a moment and savor Stosuy's overarching metaphor of comparing the album to masturbation and then consider how it essentially turns the review into someone masturbating over his distaste for someone else's masturbating. Hell, at least the Mars Volta made an album.

malachi constant a constant no more

It is with regret that i pass on the news of Malachi Constant's passing. Hereafter is a note from Carl Wedoff ...

September 2, 11:51 pm

To whom it may concern:

After a sometimes fruitful seven-and-a-half year existence, Malachi
Constant has quit playing. No blow-out last show or anything, it was high
time to call it off. So that's that. When bands start spinning wheels and
stop having good times, it is proper to move on. Our first show was February
12, 1999 in the basement of Dupre Hall on the Macalester College campus. Our
last show was August 30, 2006 at the Triple Rock Social Club with Hockey
Night and Curtains. We released six albums in the interim: Incitement to
Discourse, Newspeak, Challenger, Zenith, Infinite Justice, and Pride. We
toured five or six times. I'm not sure which.

Thanks to everyone/anyone who liked us and helped us out; we met and
surpassed the modest goals we set out for ourselves as teenagers, and we
have audiences, press, radio, bar owners, teen maniacs, etc. to thank.
Malachi Constant was shown a surplus of excitement and kindness; we
apprecitate it more than words can express. It was quite the formative
experience.

In the future, be sure to hear from us. Ours are active musical lives;
we overflow with ideas and ambition.

Love always.

Carl / Malachi Constant.

I'd like to point out that their entry on MinneWiki already indicates that they've broken up. She moves so fast, this web of worldwideness.