Radio Free Minnesota

I'm posting this for two purposes: 1.) to direct you to the website of Homegrown and tell you that I'm going to be on there tonight, New Year's Eve, with Dave Campbell talking about the year in music and playing some staff picks and some of my picks. Given that it's NYE and all, we pre-taped it on Wednesday, but you can listen online tonight at 10 pm CST. You can also listen on Drive 105 (105.1, 105.3 and 105.5) if you're in the Twin Cities. Come on, you probably have nothing else to do tonight, right? And 2.) to get that picture of Hinder further down the page. I can't stand looking at that anymore.

Holy crap.

Anybody ever hear of Hinder? I hadn't either, until I turned on the TV this morning and VH1 was showing a video by them. Such are the dangers of watching "I Love the '90s" late at night (it was '98 last night--remember the dancing baby?).

The only reason I even bring it up is that they suck. And I mean suck in ways I can't even conceive of, and it made me think: I'm not a very critical writer, in the sense that I don't spend a lot of time talking about what I don't like. I tend to like this, because I feel like my job isn't to hand down judgements on what's good and what isn't, but rather to find the things that I think are really unique, special and worth listening to and give 'em a little nudge or just talk about why I think they're important in the hopes that people might get motivated to go get some great new music.

Hinder reminded me that there's a truly gigantic swath of absolute trash clogging the airwaves and record stores of America. I'm not going to give it any more time than just to say please. Please step away from the piles of pseudo-heavy sentimental bullshit that get stuffed down your craw by MTV and VH1 and Clear Channel and check out something that's worth something. Like, maybe something from the post below.

All right. Done. Sorry to get all Tom Hallett on you there.

The 20 '06 Appendix

In case you didn't get here from there, here's a link to my article about my 20 '06 mix, 20 songs from my 20 favorite albums, local and national, of '06. This here's the appendix, and some fancily pantsed stuff that links you to the mix, I hope:

Here are the lists, in ranked order, which I actually put some thought into.

Top Ten National Records of 2006

1. Grizzly Bear, Yellow House
2. Midlake, The Trials of Van Occupanther
3. Ghostface Killah, Fishscale
4. Crystal Skulls, Outgoing Behavior
5. The Knife, Silent Shout
6. Band of Horses, Everything All the Time
7. Boris, Pink
8. Islands, Return to the Sea
9. Snowden, Anti-Anti
10. Small Sins, Small Sins

Top Ten Local Records of 2006

1. P.O.S., Audition
2. Mouthful of Bees, The End
3. Kill the Vultures, Careless Flame
4. Haley Bonar, Lure the Fox
5. The Plastic Constellations, Crusades
6. Jeremy Messersmith, The Alcatraz Kid
7. The Danforths, Look Out for Wolves
8. Dosh, The Lost Take
9. One for the Team, Good Boys Don't Make Noise
10. Awesome Snakes, Venom

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Subtle, For Hero: For Fool :: The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America :: Phoenix, It's Never Been Like That :: Lupe Fiasco, Food and Liquor :: Jeremy Enigk, World Waits :: Destroyer, Destroyer's Rubies :: Duplomacy, All These Long Drives :: Adam Arcuragi, Adam Arcuragi :: Rhymefest, Blue Collar :: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Broom :: TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain :: M. Ward, Post-War :: The Alarmists, A Detail of Soldiers :: Jelloslave, Touch It

And you know what? I'm probably forgetting some local releases in the honorable mentions, so I'll come back and fix that up, too.

Happy 2006.

"One with the freaks"

Recently I've been combing through my iTunes library and finding and/or re-finding all kinds of great stuff I had forgotten about. I made a killer powerpop mix (Teenage Fanclub, Matthew Sweet, A.C. Newman, all the greats) and I also put The Notwist's amazing album Neon Golden back up on my iPod.

The song that really grabbed me this time around is "One With the Freaks," which you can listen to on their MySpace page here. I suggest you go there now and listen to it. I'll wait.

Neon Golden spent about three months as my favorite album back in the spring of '04, and my favorite song ping-ponged back and forth between "One With the Freaks" and "Consequence." What's all the more unbelievable is that these guys used to be a serious German punk band. I went back and got 12, which was their first record to dabble in electronics, but man, it's still got nothing on this one. I'm listening to "One With the Freaks" again. When it kicks in at the close of the first chorus, there can't be anything better than that sound. Plus, there's something extra-touching about Markus Acher's German accent: "Have you ever / Have you ever / Been all messed up?" I interviewed him via e-mail when 13&God came to play the Walker and I asked him about writing in a foreign language.

“[I]t’s difficult and strange,” he said of writing songs in a non-native language, “but I grew up with music with English lyrics, so I never thought about it when I wrote my first song. It was the language of pop music for me. Now I’ve thought a lot about it and I think it makes me very limited, but it also offers me possibilities of using language different[ly] than native speakers do, which is a special, more unconscious way to poetry. I don’t try to sound like a native speaker; I want to stumble through the English language and maybe find some truth by saying it differently.”

And I think he does, you know? He uses some weird syntax and vocab, and it has this strangely sweet aspect to it. Like in "Consequence": "You're the color / you're the movement and the spin / Never / couldn't stay with me the whole day long / Fail with consequence / lose with eloquence / and smile / I'm not in this movie / I'm not in this song / Never / leave me paralyzed, love."

Damn. You can listen to "Consequence" on their MySpace page, too. I should probably start keeping that best of the '00s list right now, because Neon Golden needs to be on it.

Also? I had a dream I was playing on the Nuggets with Allen Iverson. Seemed like a cool guy, but man, that new ball does suck. When I was coming up for the court for a layup, it was squeaking or something really weird.

Mythbusters

Did anybody else watch any of the Mythbusters marathon on the Discovery Channel yesterday? What a great show; I had no idea. The idea for having a show in which urban legends and other bits of apocrypha are put to the test scientifically is brilliant enough, but splitting the show between two separate teams (stunt coordinators Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage are one team--the more technically daring team--and Kari Byron, Grant Imahara and Scottie Chapman make up the other, more J.V. team--they're relegated to tasks like tracking how well Christmas trees respond to different mixtures for food or determining if you can really shoot a hole in a silver dollar with a Colt Peacemaker) is the really genius thing. It keeps you interested the whole time, and from episode to episode, as my fiancee can attest, much to her chagrin.

The highpoint of the episodes I saw yesterday was when they tried to cut a pig carcass in half by snapping a high tension line. They couldn't do it, no matter what gauge of metal wire they used, including some seriously heavy duty stuff. Their conclusion? It might kill you, but you won't be cut in half by a snapping wire, even if it has 40,000 lbs of pressure on it. But then Adam Savage got frustrated with their inability to cut the pig in half, so he looped the heavy gauge wire around Mr. Oinkers, tied the other end to an industrial forklift and hit the gas. Result? "Pork salad," in the words of Hyneman.

The show's pure gold.

Deftones at First Ave

Wow. Just wow. If you ever have a chance to catch a band that's used to playing in arenas and at outdoor festivals in a venue the size of First Ave, I heartily recommend doing it. I've never heard a heavy, incredibly loud band sound so GOOD. I saw Soundgarden three or four times in their heyday, and let me tell you, they sucked live. I remember Metallica being impressive, but it was at Lollapalooza, so it's pretty hard to judge sound. I distinctly remember disliking Ministry live.

But Deftones were so self-assured and solid. I had heard mixed things about them live, but I thought Chino Moreno was in great voice, hitting all the high notes, even on throat-wreckers like "Digital Bath" from White Pony. They covered a lot of ground, playing songs from every album they've released (I'm pretty sure--I'm not too familiar with Adrenaline), although the highlights were "My Own Summer (Shove It)," "Knife Prty," and "Xerces."

Here's where I get all meta on your ass: Even if you're not a fan of loud, heavy, aggressive music, I think checking out Deftones, especially live, is worth your time. I think that seeing anyone who's really good at something do it in person is worth your time: a deft surgeon in the operating room, a tennis player like Roger Federer playing in a final, a classical pianist performing Bach's "Well-Tempered Klavier," Defontes absolutely destroying the mainroom at First Ave. Because here's the thing: seeing people who have mastered a discipline, performing at the height of their abilities, is just about the most beautiful thing I can imagine, not to mention just about the only thing worth something in this here life.

I'm not a believer in the afterlife, so I think we need to make the most of what we've got right now.

This is something Kevin McHale and the rest of the Timberwolves management should keep in mind in the future. Goddamnit. I can't believe we didn't get Iverson.

I mean, actually, I can, which is what makes it all the worse. I'd been trying to come up with the right real world analogy for how it made me feel when I read the news that A.I. had gone to Denver, and I finally came up with it last night.

You're in a relationship, and it was good for a while, but now it's getting on six months or so and things aren't going great. You have moments where you think you've got to get out and then moments when you think it might work out. So you plan a vacation with your S.O., but you're not kidding yourself--you know it probably won't fix anything deep down, but it's going to be fun and maybe you can forget about the problems for a while. But then in the lead-up to the vacation you begin to invest it with way more significance than it should have, maybe just subconsciously. And then two days before you're supposed to go, you have to cancel because of some entirely stupid extenuating circumstances. But now you suddenly feel EVEN WORSE than you did before you planned the vacation because the failure of the vacation to come to fruition is just another example of what an abject failure the entire relationship is, and, as a matter of fact, the vacation's cancellation comes to represent the entire endeavor's absolute crappiness.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2006-07 Minnesota Timberwolves. Kevin: please, just go. I'll hold the door.

A.I. Trade Watch 2006

All right, it's officially on. After moving from denial into acceptance in a hot ticket a couple weeks back, I'm firmly back at the top of the cycle with rumors of Allen Iverson being traded to the T'wolves. Apparently he's ain't going to the Bobcats, and some other teams have already bowed out of the running. Put me down as being for it, damnit. Back when I first got into basketball (oh, around '99) Iverson was one of my favorite players, and I'm sure he'd make a great, gutsy addition. It's clear Garnett is itching to have a real player alongside him.

Can I sign up for some kind of e-mail notification?

Dream, brother

Mouthful of Bees' singer Chris Farstad's quavering alto¹ has gotten me back on a mini-Jeff Buckley kick this morning. Also, local label Sugarfoot Music has just put out a compilation called For New Orleans whose real standout track is a recording of Jeff Buckley singing "I Shall Be Released" over the phone on a radio show from Jersey with a band of on-air musicians that includes cellist Michelle Kinney from Jelloslave. That was a complicated sentence. It's a striking performance for the ridiculous clarity of the sound of the band² as opposed to the ragged phone-compressed sound of Buckley's voice. The full story of the recording is included in the extensive booklet that comes with the disc. Anywho, the release party for the disc is this Sunday, and you can get more info on the Pulse website here.

So anyways, this Jeff Buckley kick is reminding of the story about how they made Grace at a studio in upstate New York³. Apparently they had three completely different setups for recording the tunes: one was a regular studio setup for the full band, one was a live setup on a stage and one was for more intimate, smaller and/or acoustic setups. And they had amps set up with mics and everything all the time, just ready to go. To me, that seems like just a fantastic way to make an album. I remember when I used to work on recordings in my apartment in Connecticut with my bandmate Todd and we had to set up and break down all the stuff every time⁴.

I also just recently made the connection between Mouthful of Bees' lo-fi fuzzy glory and Chris Lee's soul-infused indie rock. The connection mostly hooks up at the Jeff Buckley comparison, but what I really dug about Lee's first disc was how it sounded like a gutter-version of Buckley, and Mouthful of Bees has that same vibe--the feeling that you've walked into a rehearsal space and caught them in mid-tune, the high end pushing into the red just a bit.

¹ Maybe? I'm not completely clear on the demarcation of voice ranges, but it seems higher than tenor. Perhaps tenor with a kick-ass falsetto?

² So clear you can even hear the crickets outside the studio on the recording.

³ Bearsville, I think.

⁴ Well, either that or live in a forest of microphone stands in the living room. Which we did, sometimes.

Grammy nominees

Sigh.

Nominations for the 40-somethingth Annual Grammy Awards are available online here.

Once again, a baffling mix of far left field choices and down-the-pipe mediocrity. Why, for the love of god, would you nominate Death Cab's "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" from an album that has "What Sarah Said" and "Brothers on a Hotel Bed" on it? Not that "I Will ..." is a bad song, but I don't think it's half the song of either of those other two.

In good news, Lupe Fiasco's "Kick, Push" was nominated for best rap song (and also possibly track--any kind of categorization that has to make clear that the best rap album must be an album on which at least 51% of the content is people rapping is clearly indicative of a necrotic system). He deserves to win. But he won't.

Snowden at the Triple Rock

Snowden's full-length debut, Anti-Anti, really took me by surprise. At first I thought it had a couple cool songs ("Counterfeit Rules" and the title track) but then I realized that "My Murmuring Darling" is also great. And "Black Eyes." And "Innocent Heathen." And pretty much every other track on this disc. The tools they use are deceptively simple: muscular basslines, delay-laden guitar parts, and singer Jordan Jeffares' laconic delivery. On record, it's a humble mix of Interpol's darkness and Bloc Party's danceness, but live, the parts make up a considerably greater sum. They didn't play "Counterfeit Rules," which disappointed me a bit, but everything they did play felt confident and solid. The switch from distorted keyboard bass to real live four-string bass on "Black Eyes" came off as particularly forceful. Here are some photos I took, plus, here's the link to their MySpace page, where you can check out a handful of tracks. Who knew Atlanta could brew this up?

Snowden on MySpace