Seconded. I’m watching the shows calendar and booking my trips up from DC accordingly.
Sleigh Bells
“Crown on the Ground”
Live in NYC, 9/30/2009
This is something we should all be getting very excited about. More on this later in the week.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Awww, fuck. I’m really going back. Train tickets and everything.
Best worst best song ever made. Ever. Hands down.
The chorus is inadequate for verses that contain the lines, “cause the other guy knows karate,” and, “like the de-li-cate wings of the hummingbird.” Also, the video needs a scene of the main character studying a massive textbook late at night by the light of a single desk lamp and running both hands through his hair in frustration.
Wait, are there two dudes in this video or just the one?
Today, after years of listening to the song “Strange Loop,” I finally looked up what a “Strange Loop” is. According to Wikipedia (so, salt-grain taken):
“A strange loop arises when, by moving up or down through a
hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started.Strange loops may involve self-reference and paradox.”
Like writing on your blog about how you have deleted your twitter, I guess, or always finding yourself in the same fight because the part of your personality that attracts people to you is the same part that makes them hate you eventually.
I like plenty of the other stuff she posts, but I think I check in on Emily Magazine from time to time just for the possibility that she’ll make another reference to Exile in Guyville, and for the way her particular references spin out in my brain.
The end of Strange Loop is so perfect, and partly because it does just what Wikipedia says. Phair has spent an hour mapping her struggle to make a mark of some kind in the minds of men who are obsessed with their place in a scene, and struggling with what kind of a person that turns her into. Judging by the lyrics, it sounds to me that she feels as though she hasn’t exactly succeeded. The effort has worn her out, and she’s realized that maybe she’s been going after things the wrong way. Musically, the song resolves into an exhausted mess of distant drums and arrhythmic guitar before most of the instruments fall away and she plays almost the same pattern - not quite, but close - that opens 6’1”, almost like she’s saying, “fuck it, that didn’t quite work. let’s try it again.”
Maybe it’s just that the year I spent listening to Exile dubbed onto both sides of a 120 minute cassette trained me to think that the album is meant to play on a loop.
WINNIE’S
Weird. I just got home from here.
Line of the night goes to the guy who turned to the stranger standing next to him and said, “This one goes out to your girl,” before singing ‘Wonderful Tonight.’
Blur | Beetlebum
Live at East Anglian Railway Museum in Colchester, England
June 13, 2009
For a while when I was in high school, Blur was a band that I liked enough, and thought was good enough, to figure they’d have a greatest hits album some day, and that I’d buy it when it came out. By the end of college, when that collection actually came out, I owned enough of the band’s albums to make it mostly redundant.
When Graham Coxon left the band shortly after that, I maybe wrote them off a little. I still listened to the records, but sort of filed them away as a kind of gateway band, one that I liked more as they drifted away from their poppier material, and whose evolution, in turn, led me to other bands I loved more than them.
In the years since, I’ve started to think of Blur as less of a stepping stone (can I have a little more mix in my metaphor?) and more of a foundational band. They do a lot of the things that feel like first impulses when I try to describe music I like. They have a great rhythm section, they seem to like dance music, sometimes they sound clean, sometimes they sound grungy. A lot of their songs start with two seemingly opposed intellectual or aesthetic starting points (confessional vs. aloof lyrics, beauty vs. scuzz, lovely falsetto vs. guitars that sound like they have weights tied to them, nerditude vs. ass-shaking) and work on stretching or re-molding the space in the middle until the relationship feels different than when the song started, or at least (hey!) blurred.
As far as late-era Grahamrox go, I might have more affection for Coffee and TV, but Beetlebum builds better. Beyond the a/v quality here being remarkable, I have a few things to say about the video above:
- Damon Albarn is a muppet.
- More Graham, please, and can we get even a little bit of Dave Rowntree?
- I’m generally not a person who thinks very much of flashing lights at the back of the stage, unless I’m wishing they’d all stay on or off. The lights here, especially just before the 5 minute mark in the song, when Damon walks over to stage right and Graham is hunched over his guitar, kind of feel like a perfect evocation of the overload in the song. It’s one of Graham’s most heartbreaking solos, partly in the way the rest of the band keeps the song chugging forward as it starts, more in the way he pulls them all into murkier territory by the time it’s over.
- They totally nail that skidmark of an ending, don’t they?
In related news, Live Forever is now on Hulu. If you like this stuff, you should watch it.
does it have something to do with the air in the bottle expanding as it warms up outside the refrigerator?
Nowhere on the Heinz ketchup bottle does it say that if you invert the bottle to let the last dregs of ketchup collect near the opening, you should avoid pointing the cap at your face when you flip it open, at the risk of spraying ketchup in your eyes. Somewhere on the bottle, it should.
Clouds burned off.
Can’t deal with pro tools or the internet any more. I’m biking to the park on the wburg waterfront with a bunch of grapes and that Willa Cather book I’ve been meaning to read for a year.
Wings
“Let Me Roll It”
Live in Australia, 1975
Sometimes lyrics have to be really dumb to say exactly the right thing: I can’t tell you how I feel / my love is like a wheel / let me roll it to you!
Maybe not surprisingly, the same rule often applies to interview questions.
