I've got to hit the sack here, as I want to watch Obama's speech in Berlin later this morning....
...but I wanted to share one thought that occurred to me today seeing some of the coverage of him in the Middle East and Afghanistan this week.
I'll start by noting that Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB head and current head of Russia, looks like the most badass Bond villain ever never to make it onto the silver screen:
Whenever I see pictures of our current President with President Putin, the image I get is that we've just sent someone from O Brother Where Art Thou to negotiate the international balance of power with Dr. Evil.
And so but I'll mention that this is a picture from Obama's trip to the Israel yesterday:
Yeah Vladdy. There's a new sheriff in town, bitch.
If I'm anticipating a new release here, that's sort of like the kiss of death...previous past anticipations include some spectacularly lousy records by Fountains Of Wayne, Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, The New Pornographers, Grant Lee Phillips, and The Long Winters. I'll never learn though, so here we go again.
August should see the first disc of new material since 2005 for Jeff Hanson. Who's Jeff Hanson? As a teenager he was the member of a fondly-remembered Wisconsin emo/punk band called M.I.J. His first solo album was all-acoustic. His second, more fully-realized with a band, was one of my favorite discs of the year in '05. Yes, he sings like a girl. He also sings in a way that should make any fan of Elliott Smith's very happy. Here's a Jeff Hanson song from 2005:
And here's the first song to circulate from his upcoming disc, a tune called "If I Only Knew". Record is due out the 19th.
Also in August, Prisonshake's long-awaited double album followup to 1993's (not a misprint) disc, The Roaring Third. As discussed elsewhere here, the new record is called Dirty Moons (yes it's on Scat Records; I'll quote Steve Scariano here, quoting Don Rickles: "Lady these are the jokes...") Robert Griffin has reloaded the player on Prisonshake's myspace page to give you the full-on glory of side one of the record, plus a two other songs as well.
Finally, after two years of silence causing me to think them defunct, word out of Manitoba is that September will bring a new Novillero album! These Winnipeg jets' Aim Right For The Holes In Their Lives is maybe my favorite record of the last half-dozen years, so new music from them is great news.
Put this in the "now it can be told" department, but I harbor a secret and deep-seated adoration for fonts. I love the damn things, and the way they make a page look. I've actually based decisions on buying books around the typeface the print is set in.
Don't look at me, I'm repulsive.
At any rate, as far as secret addictions go, addiction to True-Type fonts is fairly benign, but I suspect I'm not the only font geek in the world, and so tonight I've got a doozy for you, courtesy of Patrick at Popehat. A little back-story is necessary, I suppose: the fonts are provided by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Who is H. P. Lovecraft? Well, depending on your source, he's either the great lost source of horror fiction as we know it today...or he's weird-as-hell hack writer who wrote for pulps in the 1920's. I loved Lovecraft when I was in high school, but revisiting his work a few years ago left me fairly cold--I just didn't think his stuff held up for readers familiar with Hawthorne, Shelley, and Stoker, the authors to whom Lovecraft was clearly paying mimicking homage. Still, short stories like "The Rats In The Walls" and "Pickman's Model" are excellently crafted genre fiction, and Michael Chabon's a fan, so there you go.
Back to the fonts and the HPLHS. The latter group is a congregation of enthusiasts of Lovecraft's work who have created one nifty silent film of Lovecraft's best-known story, "The Call Of C'thulhu", and have others in the works. In the course of making these films, they created some altogether amazing fonts for use in creating props--telegraphs, diary notes, newspaper articles, etc.--and have made these fonts available to the general public, via this page. They've made a number of them available free...and also put an entire huge body of work together for download for twenty bucks. I'm a geek, I splurged, but even if you get the freebies, these are some seriously bitchin' typefaces.
My favorite free font is this great antique italic font. I love how subtly different it is from regular Roman fonts that we see every day:
I think my favorite font in the pay-pack is this one:
or this one:
One final, unrelated note on famous fonts: The "X" in the X-Files logo is the same typeface as Cheap Trick's logo. Do with that information what you will.
Paul Westerberg's latest album (?), entitled "49:00" is available via Amazon.com right here as a direct mp3 download here: "49:00 Of Your Life"
Get it today and it'll run you 49 cents. There's a catch, of course: You can only download it as one large, 43 minute mp3 file, sorta like they way we post mix-CD's here at the 'Narc.
On my second listen-through right now, and maybe this is the easy cost of admission speaking, but this sure sounds like the best thing Paulie's done in a long time. I'd call it a great record, but that evokes images of "Let It Be" and "Tim". Call it "great" in the way that the last two 'Mats albums have become great over the passage of time (yeah, if you dismissed those two discs when they came out, go back and listen now...they sound pheee-nominal.)
Thanks to friend of the 'Narc Jeff Green at 1Up for the tip on this!
Dunno if I've mentioned it on the blog here, but one of my favorite ways to spend an evening discovering music I've never heard of is to start going through the bands on my myspace friends list and clicking on the artists in their friends lists. You end up listening to a lot of derivative, crappy music...but every now and then you uncover a gem.
Last week while doing this, I noticed a friend icon on Steve's myspace page that I hadn't seen before, for a fellow named David Werner. The songs posted at Werner's myspace page are pretty awful vinyl rips of a 1974 album he recorded...but even with all the pops and hiss, the songs themselves sound freaking great, which gets me thinking:
Who the hell is David Werner?
A little searching on the internet reveals that Werner was a fantastically talented California teenager with a flair for production and songwriting who put together an ace studio band and had a brief run at trying to be a Stateside answer to Ziggy Stardust...but things never took. Two albums in the early seventies, "Whizz Kid" (yes, after the Mott The Hoople song) and "Imagination Quota", and one final stab at the brass ring in 1979 with a harder rocking self-titled album (with a song produced by Ian Hunter of Mott). After that he went into the production side of music, and penned a few hit songs for folks like Billy Idol and continues to do music production and songwriting in California to this day.
Here's the thing. None of his albums are available on digital in any form--no CD reissues, nothing via digital download. Nada. This is a loss.
David Werner, you see, is freaking brilliant. His debut album, "Whizz Kid" especially, sounds like the record that Dan Bejar has been trying to write for Destroyer for the last five years. It also sounds like something Scott Miller of Loud Family/Game Theory fame listened to obsessively. It is a stunning slab of glam rock goodness, filled with Werner's fey-Bowie-ish vocals, gospel backing vocals, Visconti-like strings, and plenty of skronking guitar when needed.
Vinyl only, though, and perhaps all out of print for over thirty years. Talk about forgotten. Luckily, searching the internet for David Werner info turned up a fantastic new blog: Vinyl Treasures. What Popcat, the author of the blog aims to do is find out of print, never before digitally available but otherwise worthwhile vinyl albums and rip them to mp3's.
The first album popcat did? Yeah, David Werner's "Whizz Kid". Here's the thing: I'm always real, real skeptical of homebrew vinyl rips to digital, because every one I've tried sounds awful, and I've even heard some studio music pros take a stab at it and fail. Imagine my surprise then when I listened to popcat's effort with "Whizz Kid": it not only sounds fantastic, it actually sounds as if the production and mix could've come from a 2008 album rather than a 1974 obscurity. You're skeptical too? Hey, here's some David Werner for you then, thanks to the magnificent efforts of popcat at vinyl treasures:
Hear what I'm talkin' about now? David Werner had a fantastic sound (if "Whizz Kid" came out in 2008, hipsters in Brooklyn and Philly and Cleveland would be touting him as the antidote to rock hating dishmops like Conor Oberst), and popcat's done him real justice with an incredible vinyl rip of his debut album.
To get the full thing, go back to that hotlink above and scroll down to the comments. Or, if you're lazy, head here:
http://www.divshare.com/download/2772494-2cd
The archive is password protected under the password "popcat" (no quotes.) Enjoy!
I think it was the summer of 1989 when my friends at KCOU, Carrie and Sarah, went off to New Zealand to spend a few weeks over a summer (yes, they were that cool; yes, I was that jealous of the experience.) They came back with all sorts of stories about the amazing Kiwi music scene, but even better, a ton of NZ vinyl. They knew I was a hardcore Sneaky Feelings fan, so they were sweet enough to bring back "Dunedin Double" and "Send You" among other treasures.
They also brought back an album called "Seizure" by Chris Knox. "He's the Tall Dwarfs guy," I remember Carrie or Sarah mentioning at the time. The Dwarfs were the kind of band I was on the side of without actually liking. They were a little to dissonant and deliberately weird for my tastes, but I dutifully listened to the Knox solo album and totally fell in love with it. A few years later I found it on CD at Vintage Vinyl, and I've had that copy ever since.
Before I talk about the Chris Knox song that you've all heard now at least a dozen times, I'll mention that until this year Knox was best known for writing the greatest indie rock love song ever, "Not Given Lightly". He wrote it for his wife Barbara, and the lyrics are exceedingly personal...which perversely gives them a universal appeal. The song is unabashedly adoring of "John and Leisha's mother", and Frente had a minor hit with it, and the song gets its fair share of play at weddings and such in the southern hemisphere. A few TV ads in New Zealand have also used it, and Knox admits to having made more off royalties to that one song than he's made off anything else in his 30-years plus music career. Here's some "Not Given Lightly" for you:
I saw Knox play a gig in the basement at Cicero's back in '96 or so, and it was pretty terrific, but I also got the sense that the poor guy was living and touring off a shoestring budget, sleeping on floors where he could, cheap motels when he couldn't, flogging his CD's and such to get enough gas money to make the next show. Down in New Zealand, he's something of an indie legend, with almost every band there able to trace lineage right back to him (through his stint as house producer for Flying Nun Records) and the Tall Dwarfs.
This is a guy who has more than paid his dues for the past thirty years or so, ok? And he's a good bloke, too, so there's that.
Anyway, eventually sometimes good things happen to good people. About a month ago at a friend's house watching baseball, I hear a song in a commercial that sounds familiar, but which I can't place. I know the freaking song, but from where? It reminds me of living in Chicago, but that's all I have. Over the next week or so, I see the commercial at least another 5 times on various networks, and finally it clicks.
Holy shit. Heineken Beer is using Chris Knox's "Its Love" in their North American ad campaign!
I'm sure there are purists out there who can't stand it when their indie rock heroes "sell out" and let an ad agency use their music to flog a product...but I'm not one of these guys. On the contrary, I'd love to see deserving musicians and artists be actually able to make a living doing what they do best, and if that means getting your tunes in a commercial, then so be it. Frankly, a good portion of the sell out accusers are getting their tunes from whatever torrent club has replaced Oink, so if an artist needs to turn to other revenue streams to make ends meet, so be it.
With Knox, you get a guy who has given his life and his blood and sweat for music, and he's not getting younger, and I doubt there's a retirement plan or 401k for New Zealand indie rockers. Here's hoping the royalties off this ad campaign set him up for life, and here's hoping that maybe people discovering the song on youtube and elsewhere maybe even buy one of Mr. Knox's excellent solo discs.
By the way, here's the full version of the song in the commercial:
I got to work a little early yesterday. I knew that the two TV screens in my bar would have a steady crowd around them for the Italy-Spain Euro 2008 match. The Cardinals and Sox would be on national TV as well, though, on TBS, and I'd hoped to catch an inning or two before the soccer game. When I arrived, both screens were showing bowling, of all things, footie fans reluctant to change stations even before the upcoming match. "Let me just check the score", I pleaded. Someone gave me a remote, and I flipped it over to TBS, and there was a "Game Delayed" logo displayed in the corner. Turns out there were a few thunderstorms around Boston at game time.
Bad day for that to happen.
Six years ago on that same date, I was driving to work wondering what sort of shenanigans were going on at the ballpark since the game hadn't started yet and Trey Wingo on ESPN radio just said it was delayed. The Cardinals were in Chicago, which is always a fun time, and the game was scheduled for a 1:05 EDT start, broadcast nationally on FOX. We weren't open for lunch on Saturdays back then, so that shift was kind of a cake shift; I'd answer phones, fix myself a sandwich, and hopefully watch the surging Redbirds take it to the Cubs somewhere inbetween all that.
I got to work and it took all of about 2 minutes for the phone to start ringing.
"Chris?"
"Yeah....Art?!?"
Art is a friend who I go way back with. He was the head waiter and later manager at the place I started off as a busboy and then a server when I first got into the restaurant biz back in college. Good guy, he and I actually ended up with the same company for a bit, even managing at the same restaurant in a Chicago suburb for a few years. We'd both moved on (and Art, I've lost your email, yo...) since then, so I was sort of surprised he'd tracked me down at work.
"Dude, my dad just called from St. Louis. Apparently they're reporting on KMOX that the delay in the game today is because Daryl Kile is dead."
My mind does stupid things when confronted by news as shocking and saddening as this. My first thought was how that was really going to screw up the rotation. I flipped on the TV to FOX and saw Joe Girardi--then still the Cubs backup catcher--announce to the restless fans at Wrigley why there'd be no baseball there that Saturday. The network went live with the news. Tony LaRussa barely made it through an interview with an obviously stunned and red-eyed Joe Buck. They switched to a backup game eventually, but the news of Kile's death, suddenly, of a heart attack in his sleep, was all over that contest as well.
Just five days earlier, Kile had shut down a tough Anaheim Angels squad in interleague play. Kile had just come back from the DL after residual soreness from a minor offseason shoulder operation had convinced him to shut it down for a few weeks. He came back and looked like the Daryl Kile of old, going 8 innings and surrendering only a single run in a Cardinal victory. On baseball tonight that night, Peter Gammons had devoted a special segment to Kile, saying that if he was truly healthy again, the Cardinals were runaway favorites in the NL Central.
Driving home from work that Tuesday night, the crackly static that is KMOX here in DC (yes, you can pick it up on clear nights) announced that Jack Buck had died.
Kile's death was something of a double-whammy then, but far more shocking. By the start of the 2002 season it was clear that Buck's health was failing and he hadn't much time left. Kile on the other hand...Kile was young--32. He was an athlete. Athletes don't die in their sleep of heart failure.
In the days that followed soon after Kile's passing, I realized that I'd taken #57 a little for granted. I knew him as a big, resilient pitcher with a nasty curve and a fastball that had tons of movement...that's it. But his former teammates in Houston and Colorado were as devastated as the Cardinals were. Guys who'd only played a year or so with the guy had to take themselves out of Saturday lineups, so broken up were they. Kile was one of the good guys in the world. Despite some terrible years in Colorado, he never made excuses and always took the ball. When his career was reborn with the Birds On The Bat, he embraced the role of team leader and mentor, taking Matt Morris under his wing and turning the sometimes-erratic Redbird hurler into a staff ace (Morris was never really the same after Kile passed, either).
For Cardinal fans, June 22 will sort of always be our November 22nd. We'll always remember where we were when we heard, how we reacted, what we did. I got home from work tonight, made it through about 90 seconds of SportsCenter, and had to turn it off. I turned down a movie with some friends and instead sat on my back porch with a beer and just stared at the street for a few hours. Six years have gone by since then, and Cardinal fans have had happier days. Only two players remain with the team from that horrible day in 2002. Still, though, it feels as if it happened so recently. Hard to believe that so much time has passed.
I think it was my junior year of high school that I heard my first Rain Parade song; the radio station at SIU-Edwardsville played jazz during the day, but on Friday and Saturday nights at 11:00 pm they'd do a show called "Nightwave" overnight and turn things over to hipsters, and from them I heard "What's She Done To Your Mind" in heavy rotation (seemed as if they played it nearly every show). More importantly, I heard the song "I Look Around", decided that it had the most brilliant guitar riff I'd ever heard, and did my best to track down a copy of a Rain Parade album.
It wasn't until I was at Mizzou that I finally found the Rain Parade debut lp, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip (and it wasn't until a subway ride about 5 years ago that I figured out where they got title from; think about it for a sec, you'll get it), and through countless KCOU radio shifts I played "I Look Around" and "1 Hour 1/2 Ago" over and over and over, practically wearing out already well-worn grooves in the vinyl. That Rain Parade debut album was a landmark disc, the album that more than any other really put the Paisley in the Paisley Underground. With dark, atmospheric lyrics and arrangements, it seemed a record out of time--an album informed by postpunk, but entirely beholden to the most lysergically drenched music the Sixties ever produced. It is an album that still holds up today, a gorgeous psychedelic swirl that remains every bit as vital as it was when it first hit the record stores in 1983.
Thing is, try as they might, Rain Parade never really managed to release a worthy follow-up to Emergency Third Rail Power Trip. The band started to fall apart before the next record, Explosions In The Glass Palace hit (David Roback left to join his then-girlfriend Kendra Smith in Opal) and that disc was clearly missing....something. They never found what they were missing, and although Rain Parade begat Mazzy Star and Viva Saturn, neither of those latter bands really ever put out anything as artistically satisfying as that first Rain Parade album.
And so I'll stop yapping about Rain Parade, and instead mention that in 1998, shortly after I moved to Chicago, I saw a terrific band at the Empty Bottle called The Asteroid #4. They were doing a set of amazing, arty psychedelic space rock wonderfulness, and after the set I tracked 'em down and frontman (and Syd Barrett lookalike) Scott Vitt pressed a copy of their debut CD into my hands, insisting I take it for free to listen to. That debut was good, playing up the obvious debt to Barrett-era Floyd to the hilt. The followup album they put out the next year--King Richard's Collectibles--was even more my cup o' joe. Abandoning much of the space rock influence, they instead drew on the energy of producer and Lilys frontman Kurt Heasley to write a set of far more immediate, hook-laden song-oriented tunes. The results were stunning, and I remember telling a friend to watch out for the Asteroid #4, because if The Rain Parade were incapable of putting out a worthy successor to Emergency Third Rail, perhaps this Philadelphia band were the group up to the task.
Things got a little side-tracked for The Asteroid #4 after that. The followup to King Richard was a disc called Honeyspot and this time they came out sounding like an entirely different band, embracing the countrified psychedelia of Gram Parsons and The Byrds and sounding like East Coast cousins of The Tyde or Beechwood Sparks. It isn't a bad album at all--I really rather like it--but I got the feeling that it wasn't the band doing what they do best, either. They made folks wait a good long time before they signalled a return back to their psychedelic roots with 2006's Amazing Dream, which was every bit as good as King Richard's Collectibles.
Which brings us, finally, to 2008, and the first Asteroid Number Four album in ten years not released under the Rainbow Quartz imprint (it'll be on Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe's label, Committee To Keep Music Evil). The new disc will be called These Flowers of Ours, and I should first mention that the album isn't due for proper release until later this summer, but for some reason the Committee's partner site, Apollo Audio is already selling the MP3 version of it. I snagged my copy last week (along with a totally sweet t-shirt) and have been listening to it constantly since. Having given it fair hearing, I'll say it now: the Asteroid #4 have finally released an album worthy of being called the spiritual successor to Emergency Third Rail Power Trip.
These Flowers Of Ours delivers on every promise, every bit of potential The Asteroid #4 ever tantalized with. Vitt and company pour layered, chiming, effects-laden guitars into a swirling mix of some of the best songs the band has ever come up with. If the brilliant swoon of "Let It Go" and "Flowers Of Ours" dont clue you in that they've decided to pick up the challenge gauntlet of Rain Parade's debut, then the spot-on cover of "I Look Around" surely will.
And then there are tracks like the stunning "She's All I Need" that starts with a majestic guitar riff, then eases off the accelerator for just a bit, before bringing back that riff with a vengeance halfway through the sprawl of the song on a searing bridge solo that takes the whole thing right over the falls. There's the walk-up-the-scale guitar and bass riff that comes bounding into the chorus of the dark "Hold On" (which neatly nicks "Sympathy For The Devil" on the verses) and gives the whole song a killer hook that won't leave your brain for weeks.
More than any other album in The Asteroid #4's catalog, These Flowers Of Ours is an epic album that sounds as if it was made to organically flow all together at once. The sequencing and production create a glorious ebb and flow to the proceedings to the point that when the plaintive "Empty Like A Child" ends the album in 10 seconds of glorious fading feedback, you'll want to punch it all back up again.
I'm not sure whether Apollo Audio jumped the gun on releasing digital versions of this, so I don't want to post advance tracks the band hasn't made available already on their Myspace Page.
...and a word of caution: Apollo Audio will seemingly let you listen to the album in its entirety, but in reality something is horribly wrong with the sound on the preview version. Nothing at all wrong with the mp3 version you can buy, but just avoid the preview, as it's messed up.
EDIT and UPDATE:
Eric from Apollo Audio writes to mention that he was using some new "great" software that messed up not only the Asteroid #4 disc, but also a host of others. Remembering a few absolutely crapped-up mixes I've made when Nero does a massive update, I sympathize completely.
At any rate, it's all fixed now. You can go listen to the Asteroid #4 disc in all of its magnificent glory just by clicking below!
...and why she should get out, and no you haven't already read this posted or written a gajillion other times already this weekend...
First off, unless you've spent the last 24 hours in a cave, you're probably aware that Senator Clinton seems to have really quite monumentally stepped in it.
I think the intent of her statement is pretty clear. The question (and this is itself important to the thesis of this post) was to question her justification for staying in the race at this point, despite the fact that the math says that she cannot win. I think it is clear that she meant to show that nomination campaigns that stretch into June are hardly unusual or ahistoric, and on that point, she's correct; in my lifetime, the nomination race in the Democratic party went late into the season in 1972, 1980, and 1984; for the Republicans, 1976 was a cycle that went all the way to the convention. At any rate, Senator Clinton was clearly attempting to show that these things happen, and used as example the 1968 race, I suppose because something rather memorable (infamous, more accurately) happened then that will bring to mind connotations of "June" and "Democratic nomination being up in the air" for the general voting public.
Yes, I know. That's a rather inelegant choice of items for "let me jog your memory here" material. But, she's done it before, and didn't bring down the firestorm she did yesterday, so she went to that well again. The big difference between what she said this time and what she said in a March 6 interview with TIME magazine is that this time she gave her rationale in a remarkably clumsy way, suggesting by her phraseology that she was basically staying in the race in case Senator Obama got himself killed (because he's black, you know, and that could happen.)
The point here isn't what she said, but moreover why, and why her answer still sucks even with context. As a few TV pundits have pointed out, she could've used 1980 (Kennedy-Carter) or 1984 (Hart-Mondale) as examples of late-running nomination fights. Instead, she picked 1968. Why that year, with all the tragedy and sadness that it brought to Democrats? Think about it. 1968, all problems aside, still resulted in a very, very close election in November. A few votes change hands in the Deep South--or George Wallace doesn't run a third-party candidacy--and Nixon is defeated.
1968 was very close, in other words, and that's why she invoked it, because should she bring up the 1980 and 1984 nomination campaigns, they immediately beg the further observation: given how terribly the Democrats performed in November those two occasions, why again are you still in this? That's the point pundits have been making for over a month now--no close nomination process has resulted in a successful campaign in the general in modern memory. The best that any candidate out of such a late nomination managed was Humphrey's 1968 defeat by Nixon, and as such that election has become Hillary's go-to exemplar.
And now, one would hope, she's done bringing up 1968, which means that if she's looking for historical perspective on her late challenge, she's looking at Democrats being crushed in a General Election and taking Democrats down-ticket with them.
That isn't a very good reason to stay in, and she knows this.
Hopefully the uncommitted super delegates realize this as well and will now be emboldened into bringing her vanity candidacy to a close now.
Hey all, still laying low a bit. I have a bone-deep cut (thanks to a broken wine bottle at work) in my right index finger that makes typing a total chore. Once I heal up enough to get this massive bandage off, I'll be back to tell you how kick ass the new Asteroid #4 record is.
