• I honestly never understood the whole shawty thing, but this is going to be abbreviated.
• Somehow, Johnny Foreigner has remained incredibly interesting and relevant over (almost) 4 albums now and a shitton of singles. Waited Up Til It Was Light is probably going to become my official #1 album after seeing songs from it live.
• The new version of The Echo & The Light by Castevet is amazing. I think I’d like it just for Six Parts Summer, but the rerecords all end up sounding way sharper. It’s like the band knew what they wanted from the mistakes in the first version, which is what they DIDN’T want.
• Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born made its way into my CD rotation for some reason. I guess I A) Forgot how mellow it was, and B) how good it was. The eight minute epic on track 3 is terrific (and so ballsy).
• I’ve been listening to a lot of the Homestuck soundtracks, both on my CD and in the car. Homestuck is very complicated, but the music is amaaaazing.
• There’s been a bunch else, but in particular - I listened to Los Camp’s! Romance is Boring all the way through again. The more I listen to it, the more I’m convinced that entire album is written about Aleks.
• Oh, and a Pancake Haus show coming up on the 9th. excited excited excited
• Apologies for not posting are for Megatokyo fans.
• I’m going to join the swelling chorus in praise of The Suburbs. While I didn’t believe in the singles being strong enough to carry the album like in Funeral or Neon Bible, I stand entirely corrected. The Suburbs, Ready To Start, Modern Man, Empty Room, City With No Children, Month of May, and Sprawl II are ALL worthy heirs.
• What I find particularly interesting is that, as opposed to LCD Soundsystem or Sleigh Bells, tepid initial reaction is giving way to gushing praise the longer the album is around. 2010 was a weird year for buzz, and I’m glad AF managed to transcend it.
• I got a copy of both the Native releases, Wrestling Moves and We Delete, Erase. While I didn’t realize how, uhm, embarrassing (?) the lyrics are, the musicality of this band is unbelievable. DIY punk at its finest, which is now officially its own genre.
• MGMT is dead to me. I don’t understand how a band that is actively trying to reduce its fanbase is so fucking popular.
• I’m not afraid to admit I’ve been listening to Dookie again. It’s like a breath of fresh air to remind myself what a bunch of excellently bratty asshats Green Day used to be, as opposed to the faux-populist bullshit they’ve been churning out since they realized American Idiot was a cash cow.
• Strokes fever is still here. Is This It? finally gave way to Room On Fire on the car CD changer. It has been over a month. I think we’re moving from Strokes fever to Strokes plague.
• Klaxons are impressing me with their new album. A few more plays and I’ll have something intelligible to write other than “ooh this sounds like bleepy fun”
• Oh, but on the bleepy fun note, I HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY endorse Anamanaguchi’s Scott Pilgrim Video Game soundtrack. It is perfect car driving, they do an amazing bit of work with the chiptune genre, and wow do I want to play that game as a result.
• Albatross had 21 plays of Think Happy Thoughts in the last week on Last.fm. That’s… Unprecedented? Are they actually getting popular??? Gasp.
I was gonna do a new post, but then I got lazy, so instead, VANITY AND SELF PROMOTION here is my band’s first single, it’s called Another, you are the first human beings to ever hear this song not in the band, I hope you like it, I hope you like it
The Boston Lockdown - Another
Play count: 6
Best local show in history. Going to change Chicago music forever. Full writeup soon.
But first, I’m doing an experiment.
• I wonder if bands can ever really be aware of the kind of psychological effects their music creates in you.
• The Cap’n Jazz reunion show was last weekend. Plague Bringer was off-kilter but decent, and Gauge reminded me how far we have to go before my scene hits the highs of the 90’s. But C’J… Man. Three feet away from Tim Kinsella. He grabbed my hair. He fell on me. He did awkward little dances. I got his setlist. I remembered all the words. The whole thing was utterly surreal.
• But it was the audience who were the true power behind the show. There was sweat, blood, screaming. Every lyric was being thrown back in the band’s face by 200 voices in unison. This wasn’t a gig. This was mass hysteria, group catharsis, a torrent of pent-up energy fifteen years in the making.
• Does Tim Kinsella realize how much that show meant to me? Does Mike Kinsella know the joy the moment I found out that American Football was only the tip of the family tree? Does Victor Villarreal know the way that I sat in front of my laptop listening to the first disc of Analphabetapolothology on repeat for five hours? These bands caused a chemical shift in my music taste and ethos, and now… Now I’m me. Music from fifteen years ago, that two years ago made a kid hundreds of miles from his home into a new person. Wild.
• The other is Johnny Foreigner, now officially my favorite band. I didn’t notice until I started dreaming about it, but their music has made me fall in love with a city I’ve never been to.
• JoFo, especially in their first album, take most of their inspiration from their hometown of Birmingham, England, a sister city to my own hometown of Chicago. And somehow, probably through constant goddamn repetition of their music, I’m obsessed with the city.
• I imagine Alexi writing the lyrics to Sometimes in the Bulling while walking by the Selfridges building. I imagine streamers from an apartment like in The End and Everything After, and it’s beautiful. I imagine the friends leaving, and onset of terrible loneliness, and then the three of them the only ones left in their city, and it’s Yr All Just Jealous, and I try not to let it get on top of me but god I know that fucking feeling so well, too well, and it eats at your heart.
• And now I’m into their city’s football club, and now I really like Balti food when I can find it, and I plan little fake vacations to Bham, and imagine going to the clubs they write about and meet the people they sing about. And it’s all really lame and embarrassing and mebbe a little weird, but I don’t care.
• I guess the best way to put it is this: Music is magic. And like the best kinds of magic, I don’t know how it works, but it does. Thankfully.
• The Big Show is Sunday. Fourteen bands from my scene in one day. I can’t fucking wait.
I really really really want to do a proper writeup about the Cap’n Jazz reunion show, and music I’ve been listening to, and some deep and interesting commentary about my paranoid fears with indie music, but for right now, I’m just too… wiped? Drained? I haven’t really even been listening to music in the car lately, it’s been just getting me stressed.
I need to decompress, somehow.
• Nnamdi is an indie god. Mosquitos suck. Underage kids shouldn’t drink.
• Mishu opened the night. I was surprised, because they were actually pretty good this time. Mishu has such an incredible record for terrible shows that they’ve become something of a running joke amongst our scene. We were all surprised and impressed.
• Touring bands! Black Churches were impressive, guitar/keys/drums doing a mid-tempo punk thing. They were a good opener, and worth the $2 door alone. I got their demos, vry good demos.
• Chalk Talk was hands-down one of the coolest bands I’ve seen in recent past. Punk/rock/emo, but their guitar and bass tone was out of this world. I encourage you to . And since they gave me permission to do this, here is their album, DOWNLOAD IT YOU SONS OF GUNS. http://www.mediafire.com/?bfm3nzijgwe
• Nervous Passenger. New Nnamdi band. Several bombs in the form of three minute songs. Moshing at a house show. Gonna be huge, in the “everyone likes them” kind of way.
• Every song that was about a chick was greeted with hysterical amounts of cheering.
• The bronze for drunken douchebaggery goes to the kid who showed up late, marched to the front of the crowd, stared at Nnamdi for five minutes, and then pulled out a beer that only said “beer” on the side.
• The silver goes to the one-man moshpit in the high school soccer jersey. When Nervous Passenger played, he threw himself with the stability of an epileptic sailboat in a hurricane. People
• But the gold for drunk douchebaggery goes to Matthew Eisenbart. Hey kid, if someone wants to apologize to smooth over whatever bad blood there may be, and you respond with pompous bullshit while you smell like underage drunk? You can get fucked. <3
I’m too tired to hash up a full write-up of the Pancake House right now, but I’m uploading this track by the absurdly talented Chalk Talk. I wish I could UL the whole album, it’s gold.
Speaking of gold, I’ll also do a gold/silver/bronze for drunk idiots of the night.
Play count: 2
I think Childish Gambino’s Culdesac is objectively a better album than Drake’s Thank Me Later.
“Well,” I hear you mumbling under your breath to your Tumblr dashboard, “of course the kid who posts to Multitrack is going to think that. Between his background in Derrick Comedy and as a writer for 30 Rock, his regular appearance on Community, and his spokesmanship for men’s high-fashion brand Band of Outsiders, Donald Glover—who raps under Childish Gambino—is kind of a hipster icon.” And you’d be right: he’s got a huge social media following (as evidenced by the #Donald4Spiderman campaign), and if there’s one thing hipsters love to hate/hate to love, it’s the Twitters and the Facebooks.
But hear me out: as indifferent I am toward Lil Wayne’s talent and fame, I’m a huge fan of his Young Money group, and Drake is at least the second strongest member of his team (behind Nicki Minaj, ahead of Tyga). Musik Iz Me writes that Thank Me Later was the most-anticipated hip-hop album since 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Trying. I know I was incredibly stoked for Thank Me Later. Pitchfork—Pitchfork—gave the album an 8.4 review, lauding Drake’s lyrical balance between “artful navel-gazing” and “struggle.” In Thank Me Later we get glimpses of Drake figuring himself out as he’s catapulted to stardom at the tender age of 23.
• Deadmau5 was insane on so many levels.
• First, just to get it out of the way; this was amateur hour, both on the attendee’s side and on the venue’s side.
• This was unlike Coachella, where I first got a chance to see the Mau5. See, anyone baller enough to drive out to the middle of the desert for a three-day drug-fueled party is a stone cold concert professional. This, one the other hand, was entirely populated by idiots. Idiots who were rolling on a lot of drugs they weren’t psychologically or physically prepared for. Some frail little woman was beating the SHIT out of a guy, and screaming at him “YOU’RE ON HEROIN”. Another girl kept staggering around drunk, would fall down, then a drunk guy would fall on her and make out. Just, terrible. A lot of people not cut out for the rigors of modern concerts.
• At the same time, that may have had something to do with the STUPID HORRIBLE VENUE PLANNING. This took place on the grounds outside of Solider Field - not enough space for a sold out show. How many people there? 10,000? 15,000? It should have held about half of that. There wasn’t enough portapotties (a half hour wait?). The water was $4, and they threw the caps away on the spot. Guys. This is a RAVE. There are SO MANY PEOPLE ON ECSTASY RIGHT NOW. You, as the venue, are OBLIGATED to take care of them. Fuck your bitchy attitude, fuck your wonky rules, I want a fucking water bottle with a cap so I don’t die in the crowd. Give it. Now.
• Enough bitching about how people suck. Deadmau5. There were other DJs who opened but tbh they were only moderately interesting. Brazillian Girls played too but took a while to get into a vibe the crowd was into. Deadmau5 is revered as the the lord of modern dance music for a good reason; build, release, carry, decay, let the beat go when you have something going on. Fuckin’ blast.
• The LED helmet didn’t make an appearance, but it’s even cooler that he took the masks that people built for the show and put them on. There were some beautiful works up there, especially the Chicago/Canada head. I admire their dedication to the craft.
• The energy in the crowd when there’s a sick bass drop is nothing short of incredible. I wish I could bottle it and save it for later.
