Seam: Are You Driving Me Crazy?

And another thing about Superman #666...what's that...I have another blog? No way! Oh shit!

Anyway, I'm going to get back on the horse with this thing, I've built up a few albums I need to talk about (if I can just find them, damn moving boxes that don't unpack themselves). Anyway, this came up while my iTunes was on random and quickly charged to the front of my thoughts. Seam's Are You Driving Me Crazy? is yet another album released during my college years that through many, many listening sessions at friends' apartments has truly become part of the soundtrack of my life. Fortunately it's also an incredible, if criminally under appreciated, album.

The band began life in Chapel Hill, NC (with Mac from Superchunk on drums for their first release) and then moved to Chicago, much to my fortune, allowing me to see them live several times. Through their three album (and several singles) history, SooYoung Park is the only mainstay, but pretty much he's the band. It's hard to describe their music: slow, melodic, clear vocals, fuzzy guitars and great beats that get your head bobbing while drinking your Old Style on a ratty couch sitting outside your shitty apartment. Don't worry, you can appreciate it just as much while drinking a fresca in your new condo in Wicker Park.

Seam - Port of Charleston

Seam - Two is Enough

The band dissolved after their third record, The Pace is Glacial, which got a love of love from the indie press at the time, but I wasn't as fond of it, it was still very good though. The band dissolved a few years later. Park is now in a band called Ee, of which I know nothing, I may have to rectify that.

Moving...

So yeah, I haven't been around a lot. I'm in the middle of moving houses and let's just say, it's a pain in the ass. Anyway, I should be through with is by the start of November so I'll pick up a more regular pace by then.

Talk at you soon.

(FYI...I fucking hate Rush, it's just that this was the only applicable album cover I could think of...)

New Music: Buffalo Tom - Three Easy Pieces

Well, despite my back-catalog still being in cold storage, I still have my wallet, so I can purchase new music. Buffalo Tom is a band that I loved in college. Their triumvirate of releases during those years of my life (Let Me Come Over, Big Red Letter Day & Sleepy Eyed) weren't the best rock albums released during the 90's, but they were almost better, because they were reliable. You never threw one on and someone said, "dude, I don't want to hear that record again". There was a song for every (college-era) emotional state: Drunk & happy? Treehouse, Velvet Roof. Drunk & sad? Taillights Fade, Sunday Night. Anyway, after spending the 90's as the perennial "next big thing" that never sold more than a few records, they gave it one last splash with Smitten, and didn't make it. It's not that the record was bad, it just wasn't up to the level of their previous releases and let's face it, if you release three great albums and the public ain't buying, well, get settled in, you're not going to be playing any arenas anytime soon. So, now, nearly ten years after their last release, they've come out with Three Easy Pieces, and despite my best efforts to will it into being everything I wanted it to be (see also: The Stone Roses - Second Coming), I've settled into liking it for what it is. A good rock album by a band that no longer feels the need to rock quite as hard and populate their songs with quite as many hooks as they used to. And that's OK. Really, it is, it's a fine album, but that's like saying, "She's a fine girl", you'll take her our for a date to be nice, but you're thinking about someone else at the same time. Well, at least it means they'll (hopefully) tour, their shows always blew the doors off.



So, long story short, if you don't have any BT records, pick up the three above (don't worry about the Greatest Hits, it's good, but not better than any of those three individually). If you're already a fan, you could do a lot worse than picking up the new album.

Here's some (as my friend Joel would say) "choice cuts" from the new release:

Buffalo Tom - You'll Never Catch Him

Buffalo Tom - Good Girl

Have a good one, keep rooting for the Cubbies!

NEWSFLASH!

I Suck.

Anyhoo, I had good intentions going into this thing, but unfortunately, fate has intervened in the form of me moving some time in the future (hopefully soon) and 90% of my CD collection is packed in storage for the time-being. That means, I'm going to have to put this blog on "hiatus" until I get into my new space and have some room to go nuts. Hopefully by the end of the year, I'll get back to weekly updates, and before starting again I'll probably stock-pile a few weeks worth so there won't be any further interruptions.

Anyway, here are a few albums that have been getting a lot of spins lately:

New Pornographers: Challengers

I know it only "dropped" (as the kids say) yesterday, but I am enjoying it. It's not as good as the first two albums, but I'm liking it better than Twin Cinema, but that may be simply because I saw that album as a disappointment. I'm also kinda pissed that I didn't pre-order it to get the super-special edition with all of the bells and whistles, but so are the bonds of living in the independent-record-shop-less 'burbs.



The Times - Go! With The Times

Douglass Wolk is quickly becoming one of my favorite critics/art writers out there. Both his articles on music for eMusic and his comics writing on Savage Critic have steered me right just about every time. So with some downloads to blow at eMusic, I gave this late-70's garage pop band a taste, based upon his article, and it was exactly what I was looking for. Nothing that will change the world, but good enough to get the head-bobbin'.

Here's a fun-un:

The Times - Red With Purple Flashes

The Beatles - The Capitol Albums Vol. 1

You know, I never really delved deep into the Beatles early catalogue, I just kinda assumed that I knew all of the songs, since, well...they're the Beatles. The albums I own are all pretty much from the late-period and I literally knew every single song prior to purchase. So when I picked up this box at the library featuring the American versions of their first four releases, I got a pleasant surprise. It's not that there's anything revelatory in here, just it's fun to hear a band that in their later work seemed so polished, at their roots as a rough little bar-band. If you haven't given this stuff a listen in a while I'd highly recommend throwing them back on.

Incidentally, I've got to say, after listening to these early records, there's a lot to recommend a new band putting some covers on their debut recordings. How many albums from the newest "next big thing" have come in with 4 great songs, 4 decent ones and the remainder fall into the "OK B-Side to utter dreck" division? Just jettison that last bunch for some covers as that can say just as much about your band's creativity and artistic ability as the crappy songs you write during the last 2 days of recording just so you have some stuff at the end of the album. Hell, if it was good enough for the Beatles, why not you?

U2 - Actung Baby

I really didn't like this album when it came out. I didn't hate it, just didn't care for it, the first single "The Fly" had left me cold and that's how it all sounded to me, cold. After the passion that was The Joshua Tree and Rattle & Hum the musical shift the band had begun (and probably should have stopped) with this album was a little much for my then 17-year-old taste. Close to a year later, I threw it on and it was like I had some type of revelation, it all became clear to me that this was an amzing album. Maybe I had matured in my time away, maybe having had to watch Def Leppard's "Let's Get Rocked" video one too many times on MTV that summer caused a paradigm shift in me, but I now knew that this was a great record. It seems like everyone else realized that too. Looking at the charts, 6 singles from this album charted (half the album!), so this pretty much dominated the air waves in the summer of '92. Unfortunately, the fall out from this album led them into their "Rock Star" phase which led to the (comparatively) dreadful Zooropa and Pop! albums. They then settled into middle-age with All You Can't Leave Behind, which certainly wasn't bad, but to me it signaled the end of the band as a vital force for defining where Rock N' Roll would go in the future. Anyway, here's a song that I truly believe was designed by the band, in lab coats, specifically to blow out cheap sub-woofers:

U2 - Until the End of the World

Getting off the main topic here, U2 is an interesting subject simply because they may be the last major rock band that were too good to hate. From the advent of the art form, there were always those stars that were at the fore-front of what was going on that, though you may not exactly like what they're doing, you couldn't help but understand their greatness (personally, I've never "got" Led Zepplin, but I understand their importance). You had Elvis, The Beatles, The Who, Springsteen, U2 and many others who were a the top of their games and got at least grudging respect from all. Nowadays, you look at the charts and you're hard pressed to find anyone who'll be around in 5 years, much less anyone that will gain and maintain critical acceptance over their career. This could be due to the fact that the music news cycle is no longer limited to Rolling Stone and the Arts section of your local paper, or due to the creeping cynicism that is endemic to today's society. It seems as soon as any band gets popular today, we immediately shuffle them off to the cut-out bin once their next release takes a mis-step. It also could be that nobody with that type of musical-landscape-changing quality has emerged since then, or it could be that the musical landscape has opened to so many different styles since them (along with the landscape of music writing) that it's almost impossible to get to the top and then do something truly "new". There's a point in there somewhere, if you can find it, I'll send you 57 cents and a copy of the Killers second album.

Thanks for listening to the babbling, I should be back (on-time) next Tuesday with a new one.

New Pornographers - Electric Version

In an effort to get away from dating myself, I figured I'd throw up something more recent before I end up talking about nearly every CD I stole...ahem..."forgot to return" to the University's radio station.

The New Pornographers started in 1997 as essentially an Indie-Rock-Canadian Supergroup/side project featuring AC Newman, Neko Case and Dan Bejar (among several others). For lack of a better term, their music sounds like fun. Riding in the car with the windows open on a perfect summer day fun. While their first LP, Mass Romantic, is good, on Electric Version, they really kick it into the stratosphere. Just looking at the track list, you can sense some of the goofyness contain within (songs like: Miss Teen Wordpower and Testament to Youth in Verse). It just feels like a bunch of talented musicians sitting around and spitballing things that sound fun. This album is best listened to loudly.Since it's difficult for me to pick just one song, here's two:

New Pornographers - Blown Speakers

New Pornographers - All For Swinging You Around

Recommended Listening: If you like Electric Version, definitely pick up Mass Romantic, as it is very good. Their third album, Twin Cinema, is good, but it doesn't have the same "unf" that the first two releases do. It almost feels like they changed their mind-set from being "fun side-project" to "full-on-band" so they felt compelled to include slow, meditative and navel-gazing, quasi-experimental tunes as well. They also have a new album coming out in August that I'm looking forward to.

Off Topic: New Music

In the interests of keeping this here blog solely "on topic", I've posted a quick round-up of new music I've picked up over at Phoning It In, check it out.

Also, as housekeeping, I'm going to try to post a new album every Tuesday here, so check back tomorrow. I've got several posts started, let's see which one I can finish this week.