From: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org (loud-fans-digest) To: loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Subject: loud-fans-digest V4 #301 Reply-To: loud-fans@smoe.org Sender: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk loud-fans-digest Saturday, November 6 2004 Volume 04 : Number 301 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: [loud-fans] better late than never [JRT456@aol.com] [loud-fans] Fwd: not all black and white [2fs ] [loud-fans] Either more or fewer than seven deadly Finns [2fs "Imagine what the White Stripes > would sound like if Jack was a classically-trained pianist... > You forgot to include "from hell" and "on acid." ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:51:21 -0600 From: 2fs Subject: [loud-fans] Fwd: not all black and white From: 2fs Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:50:31 -0600 Subject: Re: not all black and white To: Singing Policemen's Society On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 10:24:45 -0800 (PST), Benjamin Lukoff wrote: > OK, red and blue. Don't know if this has been posted before. Take a look. > > http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/ That's very cool - and I was actually thinking of doing something rather like that, since there were very few states that didn't have at least 40% Kerry voters. I really hate the red/blue thing - esp. because rendered graphically according to the winner-take-all Electoral College system, it creates a far more polarized reflection of things than is actually the case. Those red states aren't all red, and the blue states aren't all blue either. - -- ++Jeff++ The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.blogspot.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 14:39:32 -0600 From: 2fs Subject: [loud-fans] Either more or fewer than seven deadly Finns This is a long-delayed review of Chris Prew's swap mix. I'd confused one of his earlier mixes with another mix entirely, a mix that had several Finnish folk songs on it (I still can't recall where that one came from). I'd mentioned that to him, so his CD came with the following written on the package - All the Hits! Finnish Folk Extravaganza!! - which I have adopted as its title. Anyway (* marks things I had): The Cinch "Once a Week" - female vocals, crunchy power-pop, with some pianner. Beachbuggy "Aluminum" - Begins with some dialogue from some film (?), and then goes into what sounds like an American impersonation of the Fall. "This car is aluminum!" Pretty fun. * The Slickee Boys "Escalator 66" - Wow - haven't heard these guys for ages. I had a ratty old cassette of this album (something-something Pi) dubbed from a college friend. This is a pretty good track: a bit garagey, a bit toward the tougher end of someone like the Three O'Clock. (My favorite track on the album is probably "Marble Orchard," a nice semi-psychedelic number...) * Marmoset "Eyes Are Looking" - This is one of their poppier numbers - still with their deadpan vocals and sort of odd chords thrown in. *Pinback "Tripoli" - I think this one's from the year that every other record had Rob Crow on it. I've put this track on a mix or two myself. I like the sort of circular feel of the guitar part and the interweaving vocal lines. *Magic Hour "Something Else" - Naomi Yang's distinctive upper-register bass playing, along with the slightly narcotized vocal and corroded guitar sound, gives this one a slightly psychedelic feel. *Swell Maps "Another Song" - British noise-merchants - similar in feel to early Wire - or for that matter, the above-ref'd Marmoset - with a song built on one of those nifty descending chromatic progressions. Borgia Popes "Constantinople" - The Residents' song, not the one TMBG did. This is from the RZ tribute album _Eyesore_ - which I own virtually, since I think I have five or six tracks from it scattered in various places. These folks speed it up a bit, making it into virtually a hoedown of sorts... * Lumen "I" - Yes, it's true: I downloaded this album from eMusic solely because the band is named after one of our cats. (Don't worry - I also found an Oranj Symphonette album out there.) The full title of this album is something like "The Man Felt an Iron Hand Grip His Throat and Force Him to Wonder if He Could Outdo Fiona Apple in the Ridiculously Long Album Title Sweepstakes But He Wasn't Sure And He Realized He Had No Space Left to Give the Individual Tracks Titles." Kinda post-rock-y: instrumental, pseudo-fingerpicked guitar, organ, slow developing. * Meat Puppets "Two Rivers" - A fine song from my favorite Meat Puppets album. The picking nicely follows the previous track. Tim Lee - "Talked About It" - There's something very '80s about the main guitar line here - not just its sound, but its structure. Can't figure that one out. Sounds like it came from a (slightly off-center) LP - anyway, a pretty nice track, even if Lee hangs around the same three or four notes for most the song. Vulgar Boatmen "Calling Upstairs" - This is one of those bands (the Silos, who shared members, are another) that I like well enough song by song, but when I try listening to an entire album, I usually fall asleep. Pleasant, slightly country-influenced, tasteful, mid-tempo...you see what I mean. But still: in this context, it works pretty well. Catchy chorus (one of those "just repeat the title" choruses - someone should make a mix consisting entirely of such songs...) The Service "October House" - For some reason, the band's name seems familiar - but I don't know why. Yes, I could look it up, but I'm lazy. Follows the VB track fairly well, inhabiting a similar musical territory, although a touch faster. The chorus somehow reminds me of acts like Green on Red or The Long Ryders...that era, anyway. Small Factory "The Last Time That We Talked" - Okay, can I just point out that it's weird to call a song "The Last Time That We Talked" when the first line is "The last time that we *spoke*"? Get it straight, folks. Anyway...male/female vocals, crunchier guitar, faster tempo - pretty nice sequencing here on Chris' part. Kinda reminds me of those bands popping up in that brief post-Breeders "alternative" window - pretty good but not earthshatteringly so. * Volcano Suns "Needles in the Camel's Eye" - Peter Prescott's post-Burma act covers the Eno classic. Prescott's voice is the vocal equivalent of this enormous, huge guy who's always laughing at stuff, has a great sense of humor...but you get the impression you really don't want to get him angry. I think they should put Prescott's voice on the packaging for "Brawny"-brand paper towels. The Super Friendz "Machine Green" - A tragic story behind this one: the band wanted to be on _Sesame Street_, and wrote this song whose lyrics are essentially nonsense leading to "punchlines" about things that rhyme with "green." But the producers of the show suggested that references to drinking and Graham Greene weren't all that appropriate for the show's target audience - and so, they made this record instead. I like the guitar part between verses and the shift to minor on the lead-in to the choruses. * Mekons "Memphis Egypt" - For some reason, I can never remember that the intro to this song goes with the rest of it: it begins, and I'm like, which Mekons song is this? Anyway, it's essentially the title track from _Rock n Roll_ - "Destroy your safe and happy lives / before it is too late..." I [heart] Mekons... (that's a dif. album...) Appleseed Cast "Blind Mans Arrow" [sic] - I'm not sure if it's Chris or the band that left out the apostrophe...perhaps it ran off with the capital letters the band hates so much. (I should note that another song here is also written all in lowercase - oddly, it's *called* "Another Song"...even though I could swear the packaging for that album had all the titles in typewriter font, all upper-case. Oh - you want me to talk about the song, not typography? Pretty nice - the chorus is that kinda moody, minor-chord with suspension thingy that sounds a bit, uh, sorry but "emo." Nice middle section with a repeated pattern while the bass implies chord changes underneath: simple device, almost always effective. AMFM "Success Rides a Shiny White Line" - This begins with what might be a Pinback-type arrangement, only played on acoustics instead of electrics and piano. Wordless falsetto chorus with some sort of eletronic glockenspiel type thing - I like this track. * Beulah "Matter vs. Space" - I'm not sure why, but recent years have seen a pretty steady decline in my liking for this band. This isn't a bad song - I like the opening with mariachi trumpets and a sort of wah-sitar sound, and the verse toughens up the sound a bit before moving into a second section (arranged with yet more instruments). Somehow, though, the whole is less than the sum of its parts...at least over the course of the album. Not sure why. Matt Pond PA "Fairlee" - Begins with slide guitar and galloping drumbeat - I was thinking these guys were sorta fastidious orch-pop guys (and maybe they are elsewhere) but this one has kind of an uptempo New Order feel (if they replaced the synths with - yes, those are horns and strings, aren't they). Nice track. * The Decemberists "Leslie Anne Levine" - These guys keep growing on me, however - even though I see certain similarities to Beulah. I suppose some people think Colin Meloy is too precious by half both as lyricist and singer - but I think that it's probably easier to get very short stories published in the form of indie rock records than in print, so why not. I really have to check out their other recordings...I have only the one this song's drawn from. (I'm pretty sure they're on eMusic, too) Junket "6:00 AM" - More lowercasers - this time, it's the album title on the caps-hating tip. Anyway...it seems there were 700 bands with nondescript names like "Junket" wandering around a couple years back...I can't remember if I've heard them before or not. Begins kinda slow and moody, with a filter-tipped guitar and resigned, quiet vocal, before...okay, I'm still waiting, but I'm almost certain the volume's going to go up soon...wait, no: they drop back to nearly nothing instead. Good choice. The overall effect is sorta Codeine-like - but that band usually voiced its chords a bit more intriguingly. This one rides a I-IV-iii sequence endelssly - I kinda wish they'd switched it up a bit somewhere in there. Great Plains "Letter to a Fanzine" - This is the song that asks the musical question, "why do punk rock guys go out with new wave girls?" Many times. The organ sounds as if it's played by a new wave girl - although given the era, it coulda been a new wave guy with mascara on. This is fun 'n' all - kinda in the way the Dead Milkmen were fun - but it isn't quite as funny. You only need two chords - but it doesn't quite deliver. If it were more punk-rock, or humorous, it might have worked better. Some good of-the-era jokes - about 4.A.D. and SST and Homestead (and "everything I get in the mail for free!") - but, kinda eh ultimately. See, they shoulda got the punk insight that two minutes of this would've been fine - instead, the song's a minute and a half longer than that. Anyway, a lot of fine stuff here. Of the tracks I didn't know, I'd most like to check out AMFM and the Matt Pond dealy. - -- ++Jeff++ The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.blogspot.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 02:48:39 EST From: LkDylaninthmvies@aol.com Subject: Re: [loud-fans] better late than never In a message dated 11/5/04 1:49:15 AM Eastern Standard Time, craigtorso@verizon.net writes: > The best I've come up with so far was "Imagine what the White Stripes > would sound like if Jack was a classically-trained pianist who had > been a total Goth girl in high school and Meg worshipped Elvin Jones." > He was too busy playing with his Tesla coil to take lessons. - --Mark S., who thinks Meg is stunning in an 19th century porcelain doll kind of way np: Morrissey "Let Me Kiss You" UK single (the one with "Don't Make Fun of Daddy's Voice" on it...there is another one with two B-sides. I got both of 'em, since I'm a slave. Thanks very much for mentioning, Bradley!) ------------------------------ End of loud-fans-digest V4 #301 *******************************