The Genius and The Idiot.

So iTunes 8 came out yesterday, and the big news was that they added the Genius, which is essentially a recommendation plugin based on the music already in your library. I installed it on the music server in our basement (101.22GB and going strong) and let it churn through all 20,000 songs overnight. This morning it cheerily announced it was done, and I've now got a pile of recommendations to sort through—which is good, because I'm bored with most of the music I have.

Posted on September 10, 2008 9:30 AM | link to this entry

Bored with Music.

Today is one of those days when I look at all 100GB of music in my iTunes library, and I don't want to hear any of it. What's wrong with me?

Posted on June 20, 2008 3:24 PM | link to this entry

Guitar Lesson, Week Eight.

My repertoire has been expanded to five songs since I picked up the guitar in January. I've got the first two, "Peaceful Easy Feeling" and "Boys Better", down cold. The chord changes that stymied me weeks ago are solid at this point. I've got two R.E.M. tunes figured out but not clean: "Texarkana" and "Radio Free Europe", each of which contain tricky changes between C and B chords. Finally, this afternoon I learned the iconic opening phrase and bridge to "There She Goes" by the Las, which is a lot of fun to play.

I've been pretty lax with my practice schedule, which has made itself clear at my lessons. Two hours of frantic playing right before my lesson does not make for a spectacular performance, but I'm in love with the growing familiarity of the chords and the natural feeling of playing along with the few songs I know. Lessons are going on hold for a little while as I catch up to some other commitments, but I'm not going to stop playing—this is too addictive.

Posted on February 26, 2008 11:12 PM | link to this entry

Guitar Lesson, Week 5.

While not completely vanquished, I've got some basic chord changes down pretty good now. My fingers aren't as handicapped as they once were, and the muscle memory is developing well, to the point that I can go to the D chord without thinking about it—a HUGE improvement. I have "Boys Better" down pretty well, and the changes are clean enough that if I miss one finger I can still fake it.

I looked for some new songs to learn, first thinking that "The World Has Turned And Left Me Here" by Weezer would be good, until I found that the main figure is all power chords. "Just What I Needed" is pretty straight-up, but there are some odd B chords in there that make life interesting. I settled last night on that song and "Radio Free Europe", which features the tricky F# and B chords, as well as some others I've already learned in reverse order.

Probably the biggest thing now is just to keep practicing so that I'm not clamping down so hard on the frets, which leads me to miss notes and make playing painful. I put a good bit of time into it this past week, so I'm feeling pretty good about this afternoon's lesson.

Posted on February 5, 2008 9:35 AM | link to this entry

Guitar Lesson, Week 4.

Given the fact that I spent most of three days in the back of a van or freezing my ass off in a windswept field in Ohio, I didn't get to practice much this past week. Knowing that I had ground to make up, and wanting to avoid the old, familiar shame of being in a music lesson unprepared, I spent a couple of hours working the first three fingers of my left hand numb to the bone yesterday and today.

My teacher was kind, and I actually did make it all the way through "Peaceful Easy Feeling" with only a few hiccups. His words were encouraging, and I didn't feel like I was wasting his time—or mine. So we moved on to the next song, "Boys Better", and I continued to fumble around the quick G-D-A change, unable to keep up. I've got the rhythm but the change is still too fast. We then moved on to the chorus, which is a counterpoint to the verse—all power chords instead of the clean, proper chords I've been learning. So I got my first lesson in "Smoke On The Water" and "Iron Man", and put that knowledge to good use as we worked on the song.

And, playing it through slowly, for the first time, I felt like I could actually learn this damned thing.

On the way out I had the nice fellows behind the counter look at the action on the strings; my teacher was amazed at how high they were (thereby forcing me to work much harder to play it). I felt mighty sheepish handing over my beginner's Fender to guys selling guitars worth more than my Jeep, but the man who worked on it smiled at me as he turned the key in the truss rod. "No, we're not going to be mean, because when you're ready to buy a better guitar, we want you to buy it from us."

There's a bit of inspiration in those words; I'd like to be worthy of a handmade guitar someday.

Posted on January 29, 2008 7:22 PM | link to this entry

Guitar Lesson, Week 3

[expletive deleted] D chord.

I went in last week very rusty (not a whole lot of practice) and came out embarrassed, but my teacher is kind and went easy on me. I've had some more time this week to get the repetitive muscle memory working, but it turned out that dyslexic Bill had gotten the first and second fingers wrong on the D chord. So I had to unlearn and relearn it, which has been problematic. My first and second fingers are all about the chords, and are like two soldiers fresh out of boot camp, ready to snap at attention. My third finger was on the special bus and missed the drills, so it's confused by all of this moving around. It wants to get in the way or lay down for a nap, muffling the other strings and messing it up for everybody. Playing the G chord is easy for everyone, and the third finger is happy to go to the right place, but every time it has to go back to D it all falls apart.

I've gone through the progressions ad nauseum for the last couple of days, and I still can't get it clean. Arrggh!

Posted on January 22, 2008 2:43 PM | link to this entry

Guitar Lesson, Week 2.

I had my first guitar lesson last Tuesday, and it was pretty humbling how much seven years of instrumental training I've forgotten. High school music is not a professional education, no matter how good the program (ours was pretty damn good) so I was always able to get by on a minimum of practice and a very good ear, no matter how my teachers lectured me. Plus, renting and transporting a full-size bass violin is not a simple matter, so if I was playing it was at school.

Still, I thought I should have retained more of my theory and reading ability. My teacher patiently ran through the basics with me again, and I had to stop myself from trying to be a know-it-all before I'd even started working with him. We talked about what I wanted to get out of lessons, and after first telling him I wanted to shred like Eddie Van Halen, I told him I'd be happy to learn chords and passable rhythm guitar. He told me to make a CD of some songs I wanted to learn and we'd work on them in turn, so I put together a playlist on my iPod this evening to start.

In no particular order:

So far, I've got my muscle memory trained for the basic A, G, E and D chords, and I'm working on transitioning between them all fluidly. The D chord is a disaster for my meaty fingertips, like a game of Twister with the lights out, but I've got it down where there's no more buzz on the frets. This evening I worked out the first verses of Boys Better and got the chord changes almost clean—except for that damn D chord. The fingertips on my left hand have a satisfying callous and a pronounced divot.

Posted on January 14, 2008 11:16 PM | link to this entry | comments (3)

Music Migration

Last night at 2AM, I finished a month-long project I've been working on late nights and on weekends: consolidating, normalizing and archiving my master music library to a backup disc so that I can swap drives around. To make a long story short, the drive in my iMac music server went bad enough that I can't use it as a boot disc anymore, so I had to compare the music on two separate drives (the working iTunes library and the backup I made a few months ago), make sure the backup was updated, and then get the bad drive ready for its new job. I tried using a couple of utilities for this task, SuperSync and syncOtunes, and found them lacking in many different respects. SyperSync does a pretty fair job of working through two iTunes libraries to find duplicates and differences, but its UI is a nightmare of little icons, buttons, and lists, and the 'filtering' features are arcane and nonintuitive. I found myself spending more time reading the manual repeatedly to make sure I didn't erase anything than I did syncing files, so I gave up on it. syncOtunes semed to work, but my experience was that it didn't find all the duplicates or missing files. Instead, I resorted to looking through side-by-side folder directories and comparing file sizes to see where I had differences from one side to the other. This was time-consuming and tedious, but it satisfied the anal-retentive part of my brain and helped me prune the duplicates and bad files from the library.

My plan is to build a Smart Folder for the iTunes server, which will import any music file I add into iTunes and then write out a logfile of the additions so that I can keep track of the changes. I had a basic version of this on the old music server I ran at work, but I found it would get backed up as iTunes added the files and cancel itself out, which was unreliable and annoying. I'd also like to make a script that will create a record of which files get metadata additions or changes so that I can update the backup drive, but that's a little more involved.

Posted on July 14, 2007 1:48 PM | link to this entry

As far as my rental car can go.

We're back for a whirlwind couple of days before we leave again, this time to Ohio for a graduation which might not even happen. (More details on this as we get them.)

Getting upstate to see the family was great, and long overdue. My parents hosted my grandfather's birthday party at their house, and apart from a minor crisis involving aluminum foil, butter, and forty ovens worth of smoke, everything went off without a hitch. The weather even cooperated enough for us to get a few peaceful, warm hours on the front porch, something I always look forward to when we're up there. Grampy enjoyed the party and kept us laughing through the entire celebration, even though he hasn't changed the battery in his hearing aid this year and is as deaf as a post. Luckily he always had one of his children sitting with him and translating whenever anyone posed a question from across the room.

Back here in Maryland, we have finally picked up our new rug for either the blue room or our bedroom, whichever it looks best in. Choosing carpet is difficult at best in flourescent light, with small paint chips, and under the watchful, predatory eye of the carpet salesman, so we narrowed the possibilities down to two rooms. Unfortunately, the room it's most likely to go into is also one of the least used rooms in the main section of the house.

I've spent the last two days alternating between paying work and computer maintenance; the parts for Jen's Powerbook came in while we were away, so I stripped it down to the bare frame to replace the DC/power board and both display cables. I spent many nervous hours consulting various manuals and writing notes to myself while organizing tiny screws in yogurt containers. Strangely enough, what took me about six hours to disassemble took only two to reassemble, and it was with a deep breath and a long prayer to the Sky Pilot that I pushed the power button. I got the lovely startup chime, a few minutes of nothing, and then...the same two-thirds-black screen I had before I started.

Rooting around for answers, I'm hearing that it's the LCD itself from a parts vendor ($300), or could be the inverter board itself, the only part I didn't replace ($60) when I had the monitor assembly open. I'm now about $500 into this thing and the prospect of spending another $300 does not please me.

However, we did find a workaround for Jen to be able to run InDesign CS and CS3 on the same machine (to recap, CS3 takes control of all InDesign documents regardless of their creator version after it is installed and run for the first time, making it impossible to re-edit them in CS) by creating a second user on the same machine and using CS as that user. Not elegant or ideal, but it gets the job done for now. Adobe gets the big Middle Finger for that one.

Meanwhile, I have been afflicted with record-player disease for the past few weeks: this is when a snippet of one song repeats endlessly in the back of my head, all day long. Last week, it was Rental Car by Beck, which wasn't so bad, but this week I got the chorus to a Counting Crowes song stuck in my noggin when we heard it in the Korean grocery. I hated this band when they were big, and now I am cursed with the melody of their second-rate hit day and night. It got so bad yesterday that I stayed up until midnight to try and resuscitate our music server, which suddenly up and died a few weeks ago. From what I can tell, it stopped booting completely, so I transplanted the drive into a spare, only to be met with a flashing questionmark. This was too much to deal with at midnight, so I tested the third machine and realized it was my old work music server, the one with about 65% of my collection on board. Good enough! The main drive with all our music is fine, but it just won't boot in that particular machine. Strange.

Posted on May 9, 2007 10:05 AM | link to this entry

Blast From The Past.

I had my iPod on shuffle this morning on the way home to the gym, and one of my favorite tunes by XTC came on. Because of the wonderfulness of the internets, I can share with you an acoustic version of that song, taped back in the days when MTV still played music, by a band notorious for its stagefright.

WARNING: Mullet alert.

Posted on January 16, 2007 12:53 PM | link to this entry

Another Good Reason To Get Paid.

Hey! I just looked thru the latest City Paper and saw that Massive Attack is playing at the 9:30 Club on September 28th. Tickets, however, are a bone-crunching $40. Let us all hope I get paid quickly, because I'd like to be able to pay the mortgage, my tax bill, and see this show. (Tricky is playing two nights afterward, so it's a good bet he's on tour with them, or at least able to show up and play these two gigs.)

Posted on August 18, 2006 10:38 AM | link to this entry

Dammit Dammit Dammit.

Why is it that when I'm sitting on several hundred dollars for a purely elective purchase of something impulsive, there's never anything to be had, and when I have no money all the things I'd love to purchase come up on a daily basis on Craigslist? (Corollary: Why am I looking at Craigslist when I have no money? Because I am foolish.)

Last week I dusted off my bass guitar and set up my little Crate amp out in the Doctor's office (it's far enough removed from the rest of the house that if I want to ROCK OUT I don't upset anyone else, and nobody can see me strike my Pete Townsend poses) and started playing again, and it felt good. Like, where the hell have you been for the last three years good. Good enough that I seriously browsed the Musician's Friend catalog and looked at gear I can't afford and made up a list of things I'd like to own in a perfect world. My buddy Dave let me test drive his shiny new Jazz bass on Wednesday, and while it felt totally different from my bass (I have a Steinberger, the bass you saw a lot of in 80's New Wave videos) it felt good to have a solid chunk of wood to play again.

There's a beginner-level upright bass for sale this morning, something I've wanted to own for a long time (I played upright for seven years), but I don't have the money for it. Do I need it? No. I have a guitar that I'm supposed to be learning how to play, but that's sitting in the corner of the front bedroom until our houseguest leaves. Arrgghh! Damn you, Craigslist!

Posted on April 7, 2006 9:43 AM | link to this entry

Small Change.

Because money is tighter than a drumhead right now, I've not been buying any new music lately. I decided to forego even the idea of buying new music and list my favorite MP3blogs over on the sidebar to the right, where you can enjoy the music they're writing about as much as I do.

Musicblogs are kind of the equivalent of freshman year in college, when everybody you meet has new and exciting music you've never heard of, and you're trading around cassettes and albums like crazy. I've found a lot of excellent music through them, and I hope to buy a bunch of albums from my list of favorites in 2006.

Posted on January 6, 2006 3:24 PM | link to this entry

I Have Succumbed To The Power Of Pop Music.

Over at Said The Gramophone, they're doing a 22-best-of list for 2005. I remember hearing about Kelly Clarkson's (Yes, that Kelly Clarkson) Since U Been Gone and how it was everybody's favorite guilty pleasure of the spring/summer; I finally heard it today. I'd have to say, it is, in fact, pretty fucking good.

I'm going to go lie down now.

P.S. Go listen to that stuff NOW before it goes away-as with most MP3blogs, they only stay up for a week or so. And the rest of the music on the list is excellent as well.

Posted on December 6, 2005 2:54 PM | link to this entry | comments (4)

Purple Is Back Online.

I took a break this morning, and chased down the wire in the basement marked "PINK/DATA" amid the spaghetti hanging from the ceiling. Five minutes later (after having to refer back to the wiring diagram to refresh the noggin) and one click, and I had the purple iMac plugged into the network, automatically sharing 46GB of music. It's good to have my music back.

Posted on November 30, 2005 12:26 PM | link to this entry

New Music.

The Campfire Headphase. Natural progression, artistic growth, improvement on the formula—good stuff. I'm glad I bought it.

Posted on November 9, 2005 11:30 PM | link to this entry

ISO.

Does anybody else out there have the problem I have? The one where a particular song or melody gets stuck inside your head and plays on endless repeat until the next song comes around? Perhaps it's an odd quirk of my particular A.D.D., but this has been around for as long as I can remember. For the past week, it's been 'Oye Como Va', the Santana version. (We heard the Mambo Kings play it last Saturday, and it's been stuck upstairs ever since.) Sometimes it's wierd shit, like the aforementioned 'Philadelphia Freedom' (A POX ON YOU, REGINALD DWIGHT) and sometimes it's pleasantly surprising—last week, I had some Carole King rocking my personal Wheels Of Steel—but usually it's just annoying.

Simply listening to other music won't erase the song. I've had iTunes on all week, and probably listened to a couple hundred songs since Monday. Nothing knocked it loose—I'd walk out to the car in the sweltering heat, and there it would be, ticking along happily like a busted jukebox.

This morning, I heard 'Speed of Sound' by Coldplay as I was flipping through channels to find CNN, and I listened to it as I collected email. I think Oye Como Va may now be gone, replaced by the warbling of Chris Martin, but I'm not sure.

Posted on July 28, 2005 11:29 AM | link to this entry | comments (2)

"Someday, Tito Puente Will Be Dead..." *

This weekend's general grind of work, work work was interrupted by two bright shining lights: Our first Netflix rental, which happened to be The Life Aquatic, and a Saturday concert at Oregon Ridge with the Mambo Kings.

I'd recommend the movie to anybody who likes the offbeat comedy. Bill Murray is fantastic, as always, and the movie is full of the strange otherworldly vibe that Wes Anderson specializes in. The touches of detail throughout the movie (look for the poster of Bill Murray running with the tigers) and goofy one-offs still have me chuckling to myself (I can still hear Willem Dafoe saying, in a German accent, "He's got hydrogen psychosis, the crazy-eye!")

The Mambo Kings are a quintet who play traditional Latin mambo, and for this concert they were backed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. We spent the afternoon packing a cooler full of food and drink, met up with J and M for the ride over, and staked out a spot on the hillside overlooking the bandshell. Oregon Ridge can be blisteringly hot or chillingly cold, but last Saturday it was pleasant and warm. We have to send a shout out to Laurie Lorie for the blanket quilt she made us as a wedding present—it was perfect for sipping (OK, well, guzzling) vodka tonics on the grass. Thanks! The concert was fantastic, featuring some original compositions as well as covering the theme to West Side Story, some Dave Brubeck, Tito Puente and Carlos Jobim tunes, finishing up with Gershwin under fireworks. This was an excellent way to spend a beautiful evening with my beautiful wife.

* Bringing it all back home, here's the title reference.

Posted on July 26, 2005 3:44 PM | link to this entry | comments (1)

International.

I found a link to the entire collection of Live8 performances available for download as separate files this morning. (Look on the sidebar to the left.) Having just gotten back from Ireland two weeks ago, and having missed the Dublin U2 concert by three days, the recent events in London just bring me down completely. Without getting too maudlin or stupid here, that shit sucks. In view of the effort and intentions of Live8, the idea that a bunch of assholes could target innocent people again to make a political point is just sad.

I don't know if Live8 had the same political and international impact that Live Aid had in '85; I know that the BBC documentary Jen and I caught in Ireland on Live Aid did a great job of reminding us just how much the world stopped to watch, get involved, and make a difference—and that feeling seemed to be missing this time around. Maybe it's because I'm not plugged into MTV or the music scene (or because I'm not in High School anymore) but it just didn't reach me like it did when I was 14. Did anybody else have this feeling?

That having been said, it's great to see Pink Floyd onstage together again; Dave Gilmour looks wierd with short white hair, but he sounds a million times better than Roger Waters. Bono needs to take those stupid nail salon sunglasses off once and for all. Richard Ashcroft sounded great with Coldplay. Paul McCartney doing "Helter Skelter" stood the hair on my neck up. I'm still having a hard time with Chris Cornell and Rage Against the Machine, but it wasn't too bad. (He can scream with the best of them, but he has a problem with the whole 'spitting venom at the Man' thing.) Green Day sounded tighter than a snare drum—props to them on their latest album. The sound feed in Toronto was the worst I've ever heard. Who was the tone-deaf tool singing with Stevie Wonder on Higher Ground? I can't say I was otherwise all that interested in the U.S. lineup—(*cough*)Linkin Park(*cough*)Maroon 5(*cough*)Toby Keith(*cough*)—and what's up with "Tami the HIV Positive Muppet?" I'd like to make a suggestion to the Henson folks: if we want to teach tolerance for other folks, we should probably concentrate on teaching our kids how to live with ASSHOLES first. Let's try "Chip, the Conservative Christian Republican," or maybe "Jasmine, the Ex-Sorority Girl Pharamceutical Rep."

Just a suggestion.

Posted on July 8, 2005 12:28 PM | link to this entry | comments (1)

Low Notes.

I love classifieds. I'm sort of addicted to them. My wife will tell you that I look at the Pennysaver religiously every Thursday. I scan the DC/Baltimore Craigslist every day for...stuff, stuff I can't afford but sure would like. I had a brief dream of buying my bride a used Miata for an anniversary present (you laugh, but they're pretty cheap) until I remembered that the Ireland trip is still being paid off and a new bed is much more important.

Yesterday, I found an ad for a $700 used 3/4 upright bass. I played upright bass for about ten years and put it down when I went to college, always hoping I'd be able to pick another one up someday. This morning, I went out and took a look at it, hoping for some reason not to want to buy it. I picked it up, felt the familiar balance and weight, and years of practice came back to me. It looked pretty good; it had a nice deep tone. The action was good; the strings felt like they had life, and the fingerboard was pretty smooth. Closer inspection revealed a cracked neck at the top of the body (it looked like it had split clean through, and the owner told me it had been repaired with a steel rod by a luthier in Annapolis) and a bunch of chips around the edges. There were two bows, both German (a good sign) and they felt pretty good, if not bent a little too much.

I'm really having a hard time knowing what to do here; I'd offer $550 for the whole thing, knowing the neck is split, but I'm having a hard time justifying the cost when we have so much other stuff going on. Plus, I have an electric bass that I don't get to play at all, given my current schedule.

I hate classifieds.

Posted on May 26, 2005 11:02 AM | link to this entry | comments (2)

Personal Tastes, or: Your Music Sucks.

A couple of years ago, I bought some used iMacs from a guy who, in hindsight, probably pinched them off a truck somewhere. The deal was great, and based on some fortuitous timing, I resold one and recouped the cost of all three. Having an extra machine to tinker with was good, and I put it to work as a music server and low-cost backup for my MP3 collection. I wound up bringing it to work and quietly advised some friends to download a copy of iTunes and take advantage of the library streaming feature.

Since that time, our company has grown to the point where there are twice as many employees, and word of my music collection leaked out. At one point, I was organizing a group of fellow music lovers to buy a used server and consolidate our assorted collections into one big library, but as the number of people expanded and the RIAA got more litigious, I decided to back away from the idea. (Dear corporate lawyers: I'm above board, and I don't fileshare.)

These days, an interesting phenomena has occurred: new iTunes libraries are popping up inside the company. Some days there are as many as seven or eight, but usually we average about five. There are some gems in there, like the collection of Lewis Black recordings, or the guy that has seven Charlie Parker albums I haven't heard, or the Metallica back catalog, or those killer Stevie Ray Vaughan bootlegs. But mostly, it's one or two Pink songs, follwed by the entire Final Fantasy catalog (apparently there is one guy who only writes music for these stupid games), and then some band called Finger Eleven. New rule: your band immediately sucks if you have a number in the name. Three Doors Down. Third Eye Blind. Seven Mary Three. Eve 6. Echo7. These names tell me that the major music labels have a computer program that spits out dumb generic names, like the Pentagon's "Operation" namer. Also, Linkin Park just sucks, and no amount of whining by that annoying lead singer guy will convince me otherwise.

I do wish people would name their tracks something other than "TRACK_1", though. Spending some quality time being anal about metadata would be helpful, so I could make an informed choice about listening to a collection of Manga soundtracks or Bible chapters or muddy Evanescence live recordings. (No, no, and definitely not.) I suppose not everybody is as obsessive-compulsive about this as me, but I'm proud of the fact that 98% of the stuff I've got is correctly tagged so that searching provides useable results.

It's funny, though, to see the variations in collections throughout the company. Scrolling through the lists yields the odd REO Speedwagon tune you hoped you'd forgotten, or a block of the Monkees, or a mislabeled Johnny Cash tune, or half the Footloose Soundtrack, or a whole library of hair metal.

Good times.

Posted on May 25, 2005 11:48 AM | link to this entry

Rockity.

I found, through circuitous channels, that Mike Doughty has a blog. Soul Coughing was always one of my favorite bands from back in the day, ad I had the good fortune to see them live twice—once at the old Bohager's, which is now an empty lot (and being reclaimed as some kind of new building), and once in the old 8x10 as one of about fifty very lucky fans. That small club date remains one of the best live shows I've bever seen. (This weblog takes its name from one of my favorite S-C tracks.)

Anyway, he's been kicking around playing small gigs for the past couple of years, and is in the middle of releasing a new solo album and going on tour to promote it. If you haven't heard any of his newer work, it's a departure from the old S-C sound, but still features ace songwriting and melodies. He's an excellent writer, and comes off as an extremely down-to-earth kind of person.

If you haven't heard it, I recommend Skittish. "Rising Sign" is one of my favorite tracks from last year.

Posted on April 25, 2005 10:48 AM | link to this entry

Music and Technology.

Last night I finally got to talk with Jen's sister Cath and her boyfriend Jason, who have been doing some research on cell providers and phones, and leaving messages on our machine. Jason just picked up the phone I've been looking at, and he has nothing but good things to report. I've been holding off because of the lack of Bluetooth support in 10.3.X, and I'm hoping that Tiger will support full iSync functionality. (The word seems to be that you can sync the phone with your Mac, but you need the optional Motorola phone-to-USB cable. Thanks, but no.) So I'll wait it out another couple weeks until the early adopters iron out the bugs in Tiger and I hear that the phone is supported officially.

I got an email out of the blue from our friends Matt and Sophie, who were kind enough to send us a sizable iTunes gift certificate as a wedding present (which was awesome but totally unexpected—they flew all the way out here, and I didn't want them worrying about a wedding gift as well), which I've been sitting on for a week or two. Last night I finally sat down to redeem some music, and started out with a recommendation from Jen: an album by Kasabian, which we decided is a mixture of the Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, and Lo-Fidelity Allstars. Next, I hit the record store disease list and picked up the latest from Thievery Corporation, an oldie from Tosca, another oldie from Zero 7, and the latest releases from UNKLE and RJD2. I'm halfway into Since We Last Spoke, and I'm enjoying it completely. (I also take issue with most of the reviews for this record and The Private Press; everybody seems to want another hip-hop turntable jam, but these guys are reaching for something here. I don't find either album disappointing in the least.) I'm jazzed to hear the UNKLE album (hoping it will be as mind-blowing as the first one) although it seems a lot of folks have been less than impressed. (This critic needs to tone down the personal dissing and actually review the record, in my opinion.)

Finally, the time has come to replace the head unit in my Jeep. Now the radio stations cut out and the casette adapter for my iPod refuses to load. There's nothing like being stuck on the Baltimore Beltway in the summer with no radio, next to a worthless iPod jammed to the gills with music. Good times!

Update: The RJD2 album is solid. Excellent stuff for any of you DJ Shadow heads out there. The UNKLE album is spotty and not all that exciting—the clips I heard online sounded...better than the real thing, if that's possible. Zero 7 is good mellow chillout got-work-to-do kind of music. Or for sipping coffee and reading the paper on Saturday morning.

Update Update: The Kasabian album is a pretty groovy mixture of genres-I'm enjoying it tremendously. It's kind of funny that the singer has a slight Ian Brown vibe going on, because I've had Reign by UNKLE going through my head all weekend.

Posted on April 20, 2005 10:58 AM | link to this entry

Garages of the Holy

Is it wrong that every time I hear The Ocean by Zeppelin, I want to buy a drum kit, set it up in the garage, and rock out with Bonzo?

I'd have to say that the second half of Runes, most of Ritual De Lo Habitual, Siamese Dream and all of Songs For The Deaf have the same primal skin-bashing impression on me.

Posted on March 22, 2005 4:17 PM | link to this entry | comments (1)