Oh hai.

You know lolcats? Perhaps not, since I know there's some part of my demographic (hey, Dad) that might not be standing on the bleeding edge of Internet geekdom, so here's the short explanation.

Pictures of cats doing funny things + captions in poor English and usually rendered in the Impact font (you know I had to throw that observation in there) = lolcats

It's kind of hard to explain why it's funny precisely. All I know is that my introduction came one night when I was checking out a show at the Triple Rock Social Club and Rob Skoro was doing sound. He had his laptop open and this was his screensaver. I couldn't look away and I couldn't stop laughing.

So go spend some time on icanhascheezburger.com. Check out this one, this one, and this one.

Familiarized? Okay, then go check out the thread of people doing much the same thing but with embarassing promo photos of bands right here. Just try to appreciate the fact that part of the appeal is that only one in ten is going to make you laugh, but when it works, it's kind of like magic. I made this one:



It's The LOL Steady.

Veronica Mars cancelled

All right, apparently I'm late to this party, but it's shitty that the CW pulled the plug on Veronica Mars. Apparently, creator Rob Thomas had pitched a possible story jump arc for next season which would leave the rest of Veronica's college career to the imagination, and jump forward to Veronica's first year at the FBI academy. Unfortunately, it looks like they didn't go for it.

A shame really, that we're not going to get to see Veronica at the Academy, but I have to say the college thing wasn't going so well. Havrilesky is right: Veronica's better than finding the lost football playbook. When the show was based in high school, it was tapping into the long line of great high school shows like Freaks and Geeks and, to some extent, The Wonder Years. The drama on those shows could be ramped up so high because we forgive teenagers their trespasses into the realm of hysterics because they are, first and foremost, the most solipsistic creatures on the planet. Rob Thomas crafted the stories for the first two years out of a fantastic blend of real world tragedy (Lilly's murder, the bus crash) and social anxiety (Veronica's balancing act at Neptune High's periphery, her everyday problems with relationships), conflating and equating the two in the process, and you believed it. Thomas was very much in touch with the way high schoolers have this sense that everything happens to them, and are never very good at telling the difference between a real disaster and their own problems.

Witness the way Logan stumbled again and again into trouble without ever learning his lesson. When he was a senior in high school, it was almost endearing to the viewers, even as it was alternately threatening and seductive to Veronica. Now that he's in college, though? His puppy dog eyes and inability to man up have worn thin.

And then there's Veronica herself, a character in the model of Jimmy McNulty from the Wire in that she's amazingly good at her job--taking her job as sleuthing, getting revenge and doing it all while looking great--and absolutely abysmal at personal relationships. She keeps being drawn to the bad boys, and even when she isn't--that is, when she was with Duncan or during her current dalliance with Piz--she's clearly ill-suited to them. It's a masterful tone that's been struck in the series: she's a classic perfectionist who's completely out of her element when forced to yield to someone else's needs and desires.

If you haven't yet, you should really check out the series on DVD. Season 1is maybe the better of the two, although Season 2does have a couple of the best episodes, like the one where Wallace and Veronica visit Hearst College.

To make this at least somewhat music-related, I should mention that VM has always done a great job with music. Britt Daniel from Spoon appeared as a cafe customer who sings a karaoke version of "Veronica" by Elvis Costello and they've also championed (albeit slyly) the music of Austin's Cotton Mather, a band that put out one absolutely killer album called Kontikiback in 1997. It's just about the best slice of Beatles-tinged indie psychedlia you could imagine, with Robert Harrison's lyrical world populated by strange characters like Aurora Bori Alice and places like the Church of Wilson. They first popped up in VM at the end of the first season, where their song "Lily Dreams On" played over the last scene, and then they popped up again two weeks ago. Paul Rudd appeared as a quasi-washed up rocker who was still peddling the songs written by his dead bandmate when he came to Hearst College to play a show. Of course, the tapes he used as backing tracks (well, they were CDs, actually) were stolen and Veronica had to find them. When she did, they included a disc labeled "New Crap," and when she put it on, what should come out but a re-recorded version of "My Before and After" by--you got it--Cotton Mather.

Robert Harrison is currently playing with a group called Future Clouds and Radar, and I just got their CD last week. Expect a review soon.

[sigh] I'll miss Vron-vron. Personally, I think it's all the fault of that ridiculous outfit they made Kristen Bell wear for the promos.

Who wants in?

I'm starting a Boston cover band, but we're going to play the songs slowed down in drone metal style, a la SunnO))).

The name? Boston Molasses Disaster.

Who wants in?

A theory ...

Maybe nobody puts out records between the end of November and the end of January because you're more likely to get a positive review when the weather turns warm. I am in fact wearing shorts (okay, and a hoodie, but still) as I write this, and I'm listening to Ted Leo's new disc, Living with the Living. Leo's kind of a comfort food type of artist for me: I discovered him towards the end of my tenure in Connecticut a couple of years ago, and as much as I fell in love with Hearts of Oak and Tyranny of Distance-- to the extent that I actively considered getting the bridge from "Biomusicology" from ToD tattooed on my person ("All in all, we cannot stop singing / We cannot start sinking; we swim until it ends")-- I fell twice as hard when my life devolved into a bit of a shitstorm.

His hyper-intelligent and occasionally heart-stabbingly delightful lyrics were a balm for me, along with the music of Death Cab for Cutie and a couple other bands that shepherded me through a difficult transition, so I was mildly disappointed with his second-to-last album, Shake the Sheets. How could I not be? My favorite writing on music has always admitted to its biases, not tried to pretend that they don't exist. How we receive any new music is so heavily colored by where we're at, if you dig, that I think the best approach is to just go headfirst into where your heads at when something gets at you and go from there.

So where's my head at right now? It's warming up outside, there's still a dirty pile of snow lingering next to the warehouse across the street from my apartment, I just bought a gas grill, I've been driving around with the windows down, and I've spent half the last month away from home, half of that at SxSW and the other half in Chicago due to my mother's untimely passing. The National have a line that goes, "How can anybody know how they got to be this way?" and I think that line speaks powerfully to just how much of who we are lies beneath the surface at a depth we can't plumb actively. But we can feel the currents and ripples caused by these sunken factors, and that's where I'm at right now, kind of lounging in the shallows, up on my elbows and just feeling the gentle push-pull of that tide.

In short, it's a good time to have new music get at me, and despite Ted Leo's new disc not being nearly the record that Hearts of Oak was, it feels all right. And that's all right.

IN OTHER NEWS: Y'all should go to the Eclectone Records Showcase at the Varsity Theater this Saturday, March 31. Bob McCreedy, Big Ditch Road, Little Man, JoAnna James, Martin Devaney, Mark Thomas Stockert, Dan Israel, The Mad Ripple, John Ewing and more. The last one was just HUGE-- I had to come late because of another commitment and I couldn't even park anywhere near the place because there were just so many damn fans of Eclectone's brand of from-the-heartland American rock and country. The addition of Little Man to the roster has upped the rock ante considerably, and JoAnna James has given them a big shot of XX to their mix of X and Y chromosomes. Get on it.

Please excuse our appearance during construction.

I could come up with something here about how the changes will improve your life, but they probably won't. It's more like just a way to kill some time and make some nifty new logos and color changes. I did try to match everything up, though, and make it as gentle on the eyes as possible.

In the meantime, I'm posting my proposal from the last time I pitched a book for the 33 1/3 series. That pitch was for Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, Derek and the Dominoes' only studio album, an unquestioned classic of rock. Not a winner, though. I think perhaps I was trying to cover too much ground, and maybe all the stuff about bridging the gap between dry academic writing and popular biography just didn't come off right. The thing about writing, as I've learned in the year or so since I pitched last, is that a small idea can carry you really far.

Proposals for the next round are coming due on Valentine's Day, and I'm waffling over what to choose as an album and how to approach it. But I've still got two weeks. Until then, here's the first pitch:

Few albums come with as cohesive and overpowering a narrative as Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Eric Clapton’s unquenchable desire for George Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd is at the heart of this story, but around it are woven other threads: a bid to slip the spotlight behind a pseudonym, the introduction of a crucial catalyst that creates a dynamic spark (Duane Allman) and the tragedies that followed in the project’s wake (its intial critical failure, Allman’s fatal motorcycle accident a year later, bassist Carl Radle’s death ten years on from alcohol poisoning and drummer Jim Gordon’s imprisonment for the murder of his mother a few years after that). Taken together, all these pieces form not just a story, but a bona fide myth, and as myths are wont to do, it makes convenient shorthand of a far more complicated and confusing story.

In looking at Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, I want to dissect the myth that surrounds it, fill in the gaps and holes and reassemble its story into something altogether more nuanced that will enhance any music fan’s appreciation of the album. The meat of my book will hew closely to a chronological look at the recording of the album during late August and early September of 1971, including in-depth looks at the additional material that’s since become available.

Ever since I began writing about music, I’ve wanted to create a bridge between the kind of dry, academic music analysis that dominates the dialogue when musicians talk to other musicians and the more natural writing in music books for the non-musician which, while an easier sell to the general public, often tend more toward biography than true musical appreciation. For example, it doesn’t help a non-musician to know that the shift in “Why Does Love Got to be So Sad” from verse to chorus is Duane Allman’s bread and butter when it comes to improvisation because it provides him the chance to modulate between pentatonic minor and major scales while throwing in a couple choice modal touches. But to simply say that the song’s alternation between frenetic desperation and bittersweet hope comes from Clapton’s lovelorn situation does little to illuminate what’s truly going on. Clapton wrote the song with keyboardist/vocalist Bobby Whitlock and their vocal interplay is a hugely important and overlooked component not just to this song but the album as whole. In the verses of “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad,” Clapton’s threadbare and straining voice is continually being smacked silly by Whitlock’s exhortations and outbursts while at the same time fending off the attacks of Allman’s guitar. For each line Clapton delivers, Allman counters with a jab of razor sharp, nickel-plated bite and with Clapton trapped between Whitlock’s steadily escalating cries and Allman’s buzzsaw, his desperation becomes palpable. When the chorus sweeps in to save the day, all these forces suddenly align, and what formerly seemed to be trapping Clapton’s vocal lifts it up, Whitlock pulling it up from above in harmony while Allman gently nudges it along. But instead of true resolution, the A major 7 tonality keeps it from feeling completely resolved. There’s nothing more solid than an octave in music, both notes ringing out in tune, but there’s something just a little forlorn about a major seventh, the top note slid off a bit from true, and so the back and forth proceeds for the whole song until it winds itself out into an exhausted and temporary peace by its end.

This kind of complicated interplay among the musicians courses through the entire album, and it’s one of the things that marks it as a genuine work of art, and not just another guitar wankfest. Allman’s each and every note resounds with taste and skill and it forces Clapton into the kind of concision and focus that’s matched only by his earlier work with the Bluesbreakers and never since. Couple that with having something real to say, and you’ve got a fertile field for improvisatory greatness.

It also turns out that the love story that inspired the album is considerably more complicated than most people realize. Clapton had already begun an affair with Boyd, despite her marriage to one of his best friends. Furthermore, he was in the middle of an ongoing fling with Pattie’s younger sister Paula, who served as a kind of surrogate for Pattie. Clapton, for all his emotive facility as a guitarist, has always been a private man, and in its way, this most personal of albums is no different. Clapton took inspiration from Persian writer Nizami Ganjavi’s Layla and the Majnun to craft “I Am Yours” and, of course, “Layla.” There are few things more stereotypically male than a wailing guitar solo, and from within the safe confines of songs that drew from epic sources or seemed to eerily echo his own situation (“Have You Ever Loved a Woman?”, “It’s Too Late”), Clapton used another man’s words to woo another man’s wife and constructed an onanistic fantasy of pure and chaste love. Examining this central dichotomy of the artistic process—the creation of a work dedicated to the adoration of another requires holding the beloved at a distance—will form a central pillar of the more psychological side of the book.

I offer this project up as a chance to fully explore the central myth of a great album, to reintroduce it to those who love it as something new and more complex, and to introduce newcomers to its intricacies, its rewards, its ruddy brown and gold texture. Fans of Clapton are bound to take an interest, and my hope is that even people who never cared for him might find out that there’s much more to Layla than Clapton. It’s an exultingly messy, beautiful, desperate sprawl of a work that’s begging to have its full story told.

Oh actors who think they're rockers, when will you learn?

First John Corbett, now Kiefer. Here is Jack Bauer holding the new KS-336, which has all kinds of custom Kiefer touches, like a holster on the back for your Glock and an unerring sense of your own moral compass. Disdain for bureacracy comes optional.

More info on the Kiefercaster

Separated at birth?

Mark Metcalf, of the video for "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister, who also played Bob "The Maestro" Cobb on Seinfeld.



Mark Madsen, of the Timberwolves.

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.

Why does Ted Leo hate Minneapolis?

Why, Mr. Leo? Saint Paul, too? We'd love to have you, and yet you've come here all of once in the two and a half years I've lived here. Please reconsider your position and pay us a visit. You can stay in my guest room.

in other news ...

pitchfork media should just change their name to must love deerhoof.

i see that mustlovedeerhoof.com is still available, guys.

quick notes for monday

the books: a multimedia meditation that completely blew me away. you have no excuse for not listening to this band today.

belle and sebastian and the new pornographers: politely excellent. stuart murdoch is charming, but who wouldn't be with a scottish brogue?

the pulse's official policy is that it is iPod, not Ipod. or ipod. or walkman.

that is all.

SXSW OnDemand on the believer's site

http://believermag.com/exclusives/?read=article_derby2

this a great article and encompasses many of my own mixed feelings about sxsw and music conferences and shows and music in general. one day, i will throw off the shackles of the band profile and write like this.

musical competitions

does anybody else find the notion of musical competitions a little weird? i just got a press release talking about the three-time national flatpicking champion. and there's the blues guitar competitions. five time winner! it just seems like the kind of thing that's not really a contest. keeping score when it comes to music seems a little like going to a professional basketball game where they don't. i know that there's a grand history of competition w/r/t to classical music in terms of auditions and things like that. there's the shred-off at the end of the movie crossroads, where ralph macchio ironically beats the pants off steve vai by returning to his classical roots after eschweing them for most of the picture. it just goes to show you: soul may be great, but it can't beat steve vai. for that you need fireworks.

but take freestlye or dj battles. there's a certain camaraderie there and i think off-the-cuff freestlye battles can be immensely entertaining if they're good, but it seems like when you make them institutional it loses something. is it just the inherent juxtaposition of rules and combat?

the international songwriting competition. of course, some songs are better than others, but it seems wrong to then extrapolate that out to a contest. symptom of our american desire to quantify everything? desire to have some authority tell us what's good for us?

happy!

happy valentime's everybody. and also happy 3,000 hits on the pulse music blog. now we join the elite company of ricky henderson, tony gwynn, pete rose and nap lajoie.

brain cleanout

so, i have a set of possibly unrelated crap floating around that i'm cleaning out.

played a great show last night at the kitty cat klub with big trouble, who are myself, josh peterson of trad methods and martin devaney fame, and twinkie jiggles and peter leggett of heiruspecs and others fame. we're starting this new thing of having singers come up and sing their songs or cover songs while we butcher them. the songs, not the singers. last night we had ben weaver, and it was jsut great fun. i'm not writing this to pimp the show or anything, but rather i wanted to say just how amazing the minneapolis/st. paul music scene is. so many great people doing so many great things musically. i had an extensive discussion with ben and my buddy jake money about how the twin cities are kind of like this little oxbow that's been cutoff from the main stream (oh buddy, pun) and has developed this fully formed little group of fantastic artists. it's kind of like when you leave something in the fridge in tupperware and then forget it's there. usually you open it and it's completely gross, but this time, it's like you pop open the burp lid and it's pure music gold.

p.o.s. may be ruining your life, but he's about to make it up to you. trust me.

jon langford (ex-mekons) does a great cover of "a salty dog" by procol harum on his new disc and he's coming to the walker in february for a killer multimedia show. it sounds like it's just gonna blow brains out of heads. we're going to have a full article by holly day before it happens, but i advise you all to go pick up his disc gold brick. i never would have given it a thought if i hadn't found out about him thanks to holly and his pr because, frankly, the cd looks like crap and doesn't seem promising from the outside. but it is, in fact, great. langford kind of reminds me of a mellower robert pollard in tone and delivery.

speaking of which, robert pollard solo album. the funniest thing about the advance for this was how it said that this was his first solo effort since disbanding GBV ... wait for it ... in 2004. wow, what's with the long wait bob? i guess they're not including the cd of stage banter he released last year as a "solo effort." in any case, it's good and of course it has 26 tracks. i haven't listened to it much yet.

this just in ... has anyone here ever actually seen quietdrive in minneapolis? who are these guys?

random.

leather pants on ebay

part of the joy of a blog is posting things for no real reason at all. i get this regular e-mail missive from somebody at badmash crew and i have no idea what it's supposed to accomplish, other than making me laugh. so here's the funniest thing they've sent recently.

the rotating quote

i change up that quote up there every so often to keep things from smelling stale around here, but i wanted to draw particular attention to that there nugget of discontent by p.o.s.

"we don't 'throw our hands up like we don't care' anymore
we throw our hands up like we don't care anymore."

what a great little bit of tautological taunting.

from the onion

we've been discussing here at the office whether satire is dead due to just how ridiculous the world has become. that's as may be, but this is damn funny.

RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs

November 30, 2005 | Issue 41•48

LOS ANGELES—The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that it will be taking legal action against anyone discovered telling friends, acquaintances, or associates about new songs, artists, or albums. "We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material," a press release signed by RIAA anti-piracy director Brad Buckles read. "We will aggressively prosecute those individuals who attempt to pirate our property by generating 'buzz' about any proprietary music, movies, or software, or enjoy same in the company of anyone other than themselves." RIAA attorneys said they were also looking into the legality of word-of-mouth "favorites-sharing" sites, such as coffee shops, universities, and living rooms.

pat metheny on kenny g

a little impromptu discussion in the office here about the relative merits of kenny g and michael bolton brought me back to this lovely little quote from guitarist pat metheny from 2000 regarding his initial statement in a short video clip that kenny g plays "the dumbest music on the planet." i still think this stands as one of the most comprehensive and spot-on critical smackdowns of anyone. ever. he is speaking about g's overdubbing of himself onto "what a wonderful world," by the late-great louis armstrong.

"When Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis's tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture - something that we all should be totally embarrassed about - and afraid of."

deerhoof

can someone explain deerhoof to me? seriously. pitchfork called them the best band in the world and i've heard nothing but stunning, 120-watt praise for their albums and live shows. i just don't get it. i thought they were horrendously awful when i saw them at intonation and, while i like their new LP runners four, i just can't see listening to it all the way through more than one more time. i don't hear melodies that catch me, arrangements that really groove or rock or basically anything that makes me want to hear any of their songs multiple times.

am i an idiot?

well, we know the answer to that. am i missing something here?