Playing around on imeem, I just whipped up this playlist of music to go along with the increasingly sunny weather:
If you’re not on imeem already, it’s certainly worth checking out. If you’re there already, go ahead and add me as a friend. We can share good music with each other. It’ll be like some sort of hippie commune based on pals and sweet jams, except awesome.
(Also, if you’re seeing this on an RSS reader and there’s nothing between those two paragraphs, you might want to visit the actual site. Sorry for putting you out.)
Thursday March 08th 2007, 10:14 pm
Filed under: Music
The Minor Canon No Good Deed Goes Unpunished made me realize how uncommon it is to find a consistently sad record that never becomes overly maudlin or some ridiculous emo caricature. This debut from The Minor Canon is melancholy in a way that matches the insecure, unsure, spinning-wheels feeling that causes the long-term dull ache of a quarter-life crisis.
Now that I’ve probably totally turned you off, let me give you a practical use for this album: this is the perfect soundtrack for getting drunk and depressing yourself by looking up your high school graduating class on MySpace.
Paul Larson, who’s played with Jimmy Tamborello in Dntel and Strictly Ballroom, is the driving force behind The Minor Canon, but there are a bunch of dudes playing on this album and the sound is dense. The horns, which would sound at home on an old Aretha ballad, are what draws me in and keeps me listening once I’ve wrapped up my pity party.
If you’re lucky enough to live in Los Angeles, they’ll be playing at Spaceland in Silver Lake every Monday in April. Check them out and tell me how they are live.
Bombay Bicycle Club
I listened to Bombay Bicycle Club’s debut EP virtually at random. I pretty regularly cruise the weekly new releases on Rhapsody and listen to anything with cover art or a name that catches my eye, which sometimes leads me to listening to a band like Fangboner (awesome name, dudes!), but it’s also led me to some real gems with surprising frequency.
Anyway, I put The Boy I Used To Be on in the background while I did some work, but it kept me from concentrating. I couldn’t help but stop everything and listen closely. This pretty much never happens.
The EP is four brisk, breezy tracks of wind-in-your-hair Summertime rock and roll. When I looked them up, I was legitimately surprised to discover none of Bombay Bicycle Club’s members are eighteen years old yet. If you can listen to this without that depressing you, I wholly recommend it. They have the whole EP available for streaming on their MySpace page.
Sleeping In The Aviary
Sleeping In The Aviary is another band I listened to at random and I’m glad I did. Their album Oh, This Old Thing? is just under a half hour of totally exuberant punky pop songs, like if The Thermals decided to set aside the politics for a minute and just get down. On the few occasions when they dial back the tempo a bit, they end up sounding like The Strokes for people on downers instead of uppers. If there was ever music to drink Sparks and spazz out to, this is it.
The Federalists
I considered taking a wood shop or metals class so I could craft a trophy for The Federalists because they are the first and only band to spam me on MySpace whose music I actually ended up liking. They deserve some sort of recognition.
Now, I haven’t heard anything aside from the songs they have streaming on their page, but I am cool with every one of those. Their twanged-out rock reminds me of Old 97’s, Apollo Sunshine and The Trouble With Sweeney (who should probably be on this list themselves—they only have 15 friends!), all of whom I love. I feel comfortable endorsing The Federalists without hearing a full-length.
Declan O’Rourke
A singer/songwriter from Ireland, Declan O’Rourke reminds me some of Damien Dempsey, who released a couple albums here on Morrissey’s Attack Records. To my knowledge, O’Rourke doesn’t have distribution in the States, which is a real shame. He has some of the same vocal qualities as Rufus Wainwright and Jeff Buckley, and that makes a song like “Galileo” sound absolutely perfect, even though there’s a bit of moon-June-spoonery in there that would irritate me otherwise. It’s too bad he took down his cover of Antony and the Johnsons’ “Hope There’s Someone,” because it works as an effective tool to show people who can’t get past Antony’s vocal weirdness what a great song it is.
BONUS – Rodney Brillante
I can’t say anything objective about his music because he’s a buddy of mine, but you should head over to Rodzilla’s MySpace page, check out his music and add him as a friend. I won’t ask you for anything for my Christmas next year if you go do that.
I’m not really in the market for another new TV show to follow, but I like Rob Corddry and there was a time when “Family Guy” was actually consistently funny, so I thought I’d give the new sitcom “The Winner” a chance.
It stars Corddry as a thirty-something dude who still lives with his parents and is stuck in a delayed/perpetuated adolescence. He’s finally driven to get his life started when his childhood crush moves back to the neighborhood with her quirky son. Presumably, we’ll get to see the kid and Corddry “grow up” together, you know, should the series actually make it past a half dozen episodes.
The show features some good, off-beat humor. You get nice hard twists and the eager, half-aware dumbassery Corddry perfected on “The Daily Show,” but to get to those jokes, I have to wade through some truly heinous sitcom devices. The laugh track is loud, obnoxious and omnipresent, the simple exclusion of which would make the show roughly a billionty times better. Also, the bits with his parents are just awful, hacky, played-out family humor you’ve seen variations of since the dawn of television, which is a shame because Lenny Clarke is usually very funny.
“The Winner” certainly has potential, but its faults and my general bias against traditional multi-camera sitcoms may be strong enough to keep me away.
In other midseason TV news, “The Black Donnellys” is a solid B+, but it looks so expensive to make, it’ll almost certainly get yanked if it doesn’t immediately find a sizeable audience. Don’t get too attached.
Sunday March 04th 2007, 9:39 pm
Filed under: Television
