Hey Rosetta! covers Wilco

Even though it seems wildly improbable that anyone who reads my blog will give a hoot about this, I just thought it way too cool and bizarre to not pass up:  only a week after posting my favorite music of 2011 (that entry can be seen here), video has surfaced of Hey Rosetta!’s new encore, which they’ve been playing on a current Australian/ Canadian tour, and it features a song from Wilco, another band on my list this year!  (these two bands seem mildly incompatible, otherwise I certainly wouldn’t blog post it).  The new encore is right below here.  It’s actually a medley, beginning with David Bowie’s “Changes”, then the previously-rare Hey Rosetta! song “The Simplest Thing”, which is actually melded together with the Wilco song “Hummingbird”, and then closing with the song “All the Young Dudes” by Mott the Hoople.  Enjoy!

Thinking About the Same Woman for a Decade

Be still.
As if the moon could haul through you
its tremor of light and stone,
as if it could clear you of sound,
plough your mind’s noise until it’s a shine
in the purl of a south-bending river.

Be still, I tell myself.
Think of anything but her.
Think of a tune you hummed standing in a line
ten years ago.  Hum it again, hum through the motes of air
through the stitches of time.  Perhaps your nerves
will find at last a tune to which they will succumb.

Be still.  Be not so heavy hearted
for a moment.  All is not a tomb,
all is not a blind sarcophagus staring dumb,
your thwarted pleasures nailed inside.

These brief, nomadic intervals of stillness
are all you have.

Black Friday in Erie

Self Portraits in Cities (a tradition I’m starting because I’m terribly vain)

Click on a picture, then once it re-loads on a new screen, click it again to be treated to a full-screen version.  Only then will you see why I am the Ansel Adams of urban black-and-white vanity self-portraiture.

Buffalo

Cleveland

Prayer

Dear G_d,

I rejoice in the opportunity to clock in early and clock out late;
to be abused by customers and mistreated by bosses;
to delight in my ability to pay off student loans;
to spend my life in serfdom to interest rates I don’t understand;
I take joy in the promise of my own car.

Amen

My Favorite Music of 2011

Yep, it’s that time of year again: time for my self-important yet entirely meaningless year-end lists.  This year will feature three lists: music, movies, and a miscellany list like this one from last year.  We start out with the music list.

Boy-howdy, this was a crowded year of music for me!  I would estimate that well over 50% of musical artists that I am passionate about had a release of some kind this year.  At one point, it actually just seemed like too much.  I wasn’t able to give my full attention to some albums, as they were coming too fast for me to keep up with.  (one casualty of this may have been the new Cold War Kids album, which I did not like, but it was sandwiched between a lot of other releases.  This year marks the first CWK album to not make my list.  Also, The Decemberists released TWO albums this year and I found them both snooze-ville).  There even, unfortunately, remain some releases I’d love to hear but I just don’t have the time or attention span to squeeze them in (new albums from Deer Tick, Tegan and Sara, Arctic Monkeys, and a live Sigur Ros release are among the 2011 recordings that will have to wait until 2012 in the Seth household).  So it is with all this in consideration that I admit to being such a pansy when making this list, I absolutely had to expand my rankings from the 15 slots of last year, to 20 slots this year.  That’s right; not only could I not narrow it down to 10, I couldn’t even narrow it down to 15.  Give me a break.  I don’t get paid for this.

Also new this year, I have included “post rock” bands in my listing.  (for a description of the genre, click the link)  In years past I have left them off my list, as the style only appeals to a small group of people, but the genre has become such a large part of my listening life, I could not in good faith leave them off my lists any longer.  There were two new albums from two of the heaviest hitters in the genre this year, and they’re both fantastic examples of the post rock game (at number 6 and 13 on my list).

As always, a mix disc chronicling my list will be sent out automatically to folks on my “mailing list”.  It will only feature songs from the top 15 on the list, however, due to the inherent limitations of the compact disc.  (if you’re on my mailing list, you know you are.  Although I typically don’t send the mix discs to my parents, who are otherwise on the mailing list.  So, Mom and Dad, if you want one of these, let me know!)  If you are not on the mailing list and would like on it, just let me know via whatever method you and I usually use to communicate.  But if you want in on the mix disc, let me know ASAP, I’ll be mailing them out soon.

Also, bear in mind (to prevent silly mean-spirited arguments that would prove you know nothing about art) this list is meant to represent my favorite music of the year, not my notion of “the best” music of the year.  You cannot argue with what was my “favorite”. And so, without further ado, my top 20 musical releases of calendar year 2011:

20.  Radiohead, The King of Limbs

19.  St. Vincent, Strange Mercy

18.  Iron & Wine, Kiss Each Other Clean

17.  Wavves, Life Sux

16.  Drive-By Truckers, Go-Go Boots

15.  Florence + The Machine, Ceremonials
I was slow to the party with this band, but I’m now firmly on Team Florence.  The lead single, “What the Water Gave Me”, will make you happy to be alive.

14.  Young the Giant, Young the Giant
One of the best debut albums I’ve ever heard.  I can’t wait to see where these guys go as they get their artistic feet under them.

13.  Mogwai, Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
Mogwai has always been further down my list of Post Rock bands than they are for most; I tend to find them too flippant in a genre that is typically super-serious.  But this album blew my socks off; it is harder and more in-your-face than most Post Rock, while maintaining the necessary pretentious artiness that makes my hat fly off.

12.  Indigo Girls, Beauty Queen Sister
I continue to have no idea why the world at large insists Indigo Girls are only for sappy women or butch lesbians.  If perfectly-crafted, heartfelt songs about the most intense mysteries of the human condition (with amazing harmony!) are for butch lesbians, then schedule my appointment with a surgeon.  This album proves the ladies can and will keep making compelling music for much longer than most songwriters are able to.

11.  The Trews, Hope & Ruin
The bar-rock Canadians from my 2009 list make a triumphant return!  This album falls short of the majestic magnificence of 2009’s No Time for Later, but contains at least two songs that made me get out of my seat the first time I heard them (“People of the Deer” is a straight-up Earth-scorcher).

10.  Real Estate, Days

This Jersey quartet is often accused of being a tad “sleepy” or intentionally understated, but ever since I saw them open for Deerhunter last winter, I’ve been a convert to their introspective, trance-like style of shoegaze rock.  Here is the outro to “Wonder Years”, off their superb album from this year, Days:

9.  TV on the Radio,  Nine Types of Light
  Certainly the most anticipated art rock release of the year, following their spectacular 2008 album Dear Science, many people were afraid we’d never get another TVoTR album after they announced a “hiatus” in 2009.  Then, in early 2011, they announced Nine Types of Light, and almost immediately thereafter, bassist Gerard Smith was diagnosed with lung cancer and promptly died.  Needless to say, the touring and promotion for the album was all quite bittersweet; but in the end, the album is a huge testament to this band’s power: soaring, soulful and at times, relentlessly rocking.

8.  Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues

Nothing brings me closer to full-on hipster status than my affinity for Fleet Foxes.  As my tastes evolve from ultra-modern, hyper rock to a more toned-down, Americana fusion, no band epitomizes my own evolution better than this band.  Stopping short of “country” but straying far from “rock”, the Foxes make me see and smell the Appalachian mountains of back home with every note.  A friend of mine once gave as his reason for disliking Fleet Foxes as “it’s like church songs for hipsters”, and I thought to myself that sounded like exactly why I do like them.  And it doesn’t hurt that on Helplessness Blues,  frontman Robin Pecknold seems to have been singing from inside my own skull.  “So now I am older than my mother and father when they had their daughter…what does that say about me?”

7.  The Airborne Toxic Event, All at Once

Just watch this from start to finish and tell me it didn’t change your life:

6.  Explosions in the Sky, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care

The other “post rock” band on my list, they could also arguably be called the most commercially successful (they did the theme song for the TV show “Friday Night Lights”, which is one thousand times more mainstream exposure than any other post rock band).  Happily, with their first new album since their profile increased, they did not make simpler, more straight-forward songs for “the masses”.  Take Care, Take Care, Take Care is probably their  most challenging album to date, while maintaining the heightened level of spiritual raw emotion that has always made them impossible to ignore.  The ten minute album closer, “Let Me Back In”, although wordless, is a dirge-like cry of sadness for a lost love, reaching a level of thematic complexity that is new for a band that occasionally relies on bombast.  And if this CD doesn’t win the Grammy for album packaging, there is a serious problem (yes, they give Grammys for that…just not on television).

5.  Wilco, The Whole Love

I’m a relatively new convert to Wilco.  Despite them being constantly talked about in the same breath as a lot of bands I adored, I resisted them because of the label “alt-country”, but it turns out, in the last few years, that label started sounding attractive to me.  So I started trying them out (and it turns out that “alt-country” is totally meaningless, anyway).  Then this year’s The Whole Love came out, and I was totally blown away.  Few albums—of any genre—contain so many varying styles of music and so much depth of feeling and subtextual meaning.  Check this performance on Letterman from this year, of the album’s lead track, “The Art of Almost”:

4.  Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What

Paul Simon has always been one of those songwriters who I knew I loved, but I always stopped short of being an active fan (buying albums, listing him among my favorites, etc).  But when one of his songs came on, I was always rapt. (honestly, I like his solo work about 100 times more than his stuff with Garfunkle).  But this year, as he released an new album, he did a promotional blitz that managed to work perfectly on me.  First, there was this extraordinary appearance on Jimmy Fallon, followed by appearances playing songs from his new album on just about every talk show I tuned into for a week or two.  And I just fell totally in love with these songs.  Musically they are low-key but extremely inventive, and like most Simon songs, they really shine lyrically.  They aren’t the straight-forward, heart-on-sleeve urgent missives that he wrote in his most productive years, but rather, these songs are complex, surprising, bold lyrical poetry that could just as easily be studied in a textbook as played on Jimmy Fallon.  I know that’s not necessarily a ringing endorsement for a lot of people—too much thinking, perhaps—but it seems like magic to me.  Plenty of songwriters at this stage in Simon’s career are just falling back on old formulas (if they’re making new music at all), but Simon is challenging himself and his audience.  “Rewrite” examines the regrets one might have with old age, but through the lens of an artist who can craft how the world views them. It seems like a song Bob Dylan would write if he stopped worrying so much about writing like Bob Dylan.  Album-closer and title song “So Beautiful or So What” poses some of the most complicated questions associated with making art—is something art just because it’s beautiful? Or conversely, does beauty DISQUALIFY something from being art?  And how important is it if art is good, if the artist is enjoying creating it?

3.  My Morning Jacket, Circuital
MMJ continues to be the most mystifying, chameleon-esque, dynamic band out there today. Are they space funk?  Jazz fusion?  Heavy metal?  Even they don’t know.  To be an MMJ fan is to be a fan of rock in general as well as this band’s unusual mystique.  Circuital easily ranks as my second favorite MMJ album (It Still Moves remains firmly in first).  Here is a video from the show I attended on this year’s tour.  I was front row, directly in front of Jim (the singer)…the song is “You Wanna Freak Out”, from Circuital:

2.  Death Cab For Cutie, Codes and Keys

  On first listen, I was afraid Codes and Keys was the album where DCFC had started sucking.  Nothing caught my attention, and the lyrics sounded suspiciously like Ben Gibbard had given in to writing songs specifically to sound “Gibbard-y” (although it is a testament to his songwriting prowess that nobody familiar with his songwriting would fault me for making it an adjective).  But then, a few months after it came out, it clicked.  And then I remembered that is how every Death Cab for Cutie album has always been for me.  They simply do not pop out at you and declare their presence immediately.  It may sound dramatic, but I’m gonna say it like this anyway:  Death Cab songs contain universes, and sometimes these multi-layered, subtle, textured universes reveal themselves slowly, bit-by-bit, and sometimes, over the course of years.  (every year I find myself re-amazed in new ways by their album Plans.  I suspect DCFC fans will know what I mean when I say I just now *got* the song “Summer Skin”).  If there is a criticism to be leveled at the band, it is that these encodings (ha!  see how that applies to this album’s title?) and hidden universes can often obscure a listener’s personal attachment to a song.  I love the DCFC classic “Amputations” because I finally see how it’s looping, counter-acting guitar structure helps to inform the subject matter of lovers who consistently return to a poison relationship that is never going to work.  But I don’t love it, necessarily, because it’s important to me.

But once Codes and Keys clicked for me, it did become important to me.  Still around are the intricate, hidden gems of musical structure and lyrical content so slick it disguises itself as ordinary, but under that veneer are some of the most prescient, precious conceptual leaps in modern rock and roll.  Frontman Ben Gibbard surely knows that each word he writes will be picked over and analyzed by finger-wagging hipsters (on whom he relies for paychecks), yet he’s not scared to write an essentially atheist screed in “St. Paul’s Cathedral”:  “When our hearts stop ticking/ this is the end/ there’s nothing past this.”  I was actually one of the first to put this song up on YouTube.  You can see my little video here.  I also found myself delightedly surprised, upon returning to the album after initially dismissing it, to find that the title track had a nearly-hidden crescendo at the end, in a little bit of musical trickery it somehow hid itself rather cleverly at first.  Now, when I listen to “Codes and Keys” (the song) I am physically and emotionally moved to a point of near-ridiculousness by the final 2 minutes.  Anyone who is trying to get into DCFC, or is skeptical but interested, all I can suggest is that you give it some time to sink in.  No other band will more richly reward a patient listener.

1.  Hey Rosetta!, Seeds

  It should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever read my blog that my favoritest band in the world of all time and forever would get the #1 spot this year.  I’ve written nearly ad infinitum about this band, so I won’t waste time going back over why I adore them so much.  If you’re new to my blog, scroll up to the tag cloud on the right and click on the Hey Rosetta! tag, which will take you to a plethora of gushing fanboy raves about them.  Seeds, their third album, for me ranks squarely as their second best album, but it would take, as far as I can calculate, a literal act of God for any artist to top their previous album, Into Your Lungs (and Around in Your Heart and on Through Your Blood).  As far as follow-ups go, Seeds delivers, with enough emotional peaks, insane tempo changes, and heartfelt epiphanies to last two more years, when hopefully the world will have it’s fourth Hey Rosetta! album.

There are many high-points on Seeds, both emotionally and musically, and somehow, nestled in there and almost hidden is the gem “Yer Fall”, which admittedly is not the standout on the album, but after seeing them live in support of this album five times, I can confidently tell you this slow-builder is certainly the live centerpiece (even though it doesn’t get played every show).  I’ve posted a video of it below, and if you watch just one of the videos on this page, I implore you to make it this one.  Please stick with it to the end; after multiple tempo changes, the song builds to an emotional climax that, even now as I was searching for the best video to post of it, makes me weep.  It ends on a stark note, as most of the band sings with Tim, the lead singer,  “My love is dead.  I buried it.”  This video doesn’t even do justice to what I saw on the road this year.  In the small clubs, each member of the band loudly sings the final lines into any microphone they can find; the result was an incredible cacophony of intense raw emotion:

“I Raised an Empire” by Mexico City

Here is my video for “I Raised an Empire” by Mexico City.  Read this post here for an explanation of what the heck I’m doing.

Mexico City video project

You may remember just a few posts ago, I had become enamored with the band Mexico City and had made a video for their song, “The River Followed Me”.  Well, I had so much damn fun making that video, and was so happy to be able to get the song out there for the rest of the world who may be looking for some of their music online, I have decided to make a video for each song on the band’s most recent album, Brown Bird.  (there is one previous album, Black Comedy, which I haven’t even heard yet).  I will make the videos in the order of their tracklisting on the album, each in no particular or set time frame.  They will be posted to my blog but not other places like Facebook.

Allow me, as I always do, to state that this project is in no way indicative of me thinking I have any skill as a filmmaker or anything of that sort.  I am certain the quality of the videos will do plenty to prove I am no Spielberg.  These exist only because I have a ton of fun doing them and my desire to get Mexico City a web presence.  Certainly, most of the videos will have pretentious airs, but that’s just who I am.  I am hilarious in person but I rarely create light-hearted art (or art-related projects).  So be it.

Although I would like to posit one caveat: I would very much like these videos to be better than they are.  For three distinct reasons, my visual subject matter is limited. These reasons are:  1.  My camera is very basic.  2. I have no video editing software. and 3. My closest non-work friend or relative lives 2 hours away.  These three factors prevent me from doing things like pulling my own focus, speeding up or slowing down the film, and having another human being in the shot doing what I tell them.  And so, because of these limitations, most of the videos will be of essentially what I am able to point my camera at, but even though this limits the ideas that come into my brain, I accept it as a challenge to make interesting videos nonetheless.  And anyway, it’s more about all of you being able to hear these really great rock songs.

I shall now “tease” you with the tracklisting.  I already have the video for the opening track, “I Raised an Empire” completed and I will be posting it shortly after this post.  In addition, I will be making another video for “The River Followed Me”, as the first one I made was essentially just slapped together.

Track list of Brown Bird:

1.  I Raised an Empire
2.  Baby, You’ve Changed
3.  Are You Spiritual?
4.  Ghetto
5.  Sometimes I Wonder
6.  Trick of the Light
7.  Damn Shame
8.  Apparition
9.  The River Followed Me
10.  You Aint Free
11.  I Had a Dream Last Night

I Can’t Quit

When I quit drinking, I substituted caffeine for alcohol.  That wasn’t quite enough so I substituted buying Pearl Jam bootlegs for alcohol, as well.  And then I subsituted working extra hours for alcohol, as well.  And then I ran out of Pearl Jam bootlegs to buy so I substituted DVDs for Pearl Jam bootlegs.  And things still weren’t enough so I substituted sex for alcohol.  And then I tried to quit caffeine so I substituted lifting weights for caffeine.  But I still wanted alcohol so I substituted going to concerts for alcohol.  And I got tired of lifting weights so I substituted hiking for that.  And then I got re-addicted to caffeine.  And then I was having too much sex so I substituted eating for sex.  And then concerts were getting too expensive so I substituted going to the movies for concerts.  And then it was winter so I couldn’t hike so I substituted more eating for that.  And then I tried to quit caffeine again so I substituted going to concerts for that.  And then it was spring so I substituted hiking for going to concerts.  And then I got addicted to caffeine again.  And then I quit smoking and I substituted eating for that.  And then I was eating too much so I substituted working out for that.  But I did too much too fast so I had to substitute even more caffeine for working out.  And then I started eating again.  And I’m still buying a ton of DVDs.  I can’t quit.

Are these really the only two things that can be in the box?

The River Followed Me

Today, something magical happened to me.  I stumbled upon a band that I fell immediately in love with, the old fashioned way.  I had forgotten how amazing an experience it could be.

See, I was in a music store.  An actual music store.  Not an instrument store, but a store with CDs, music posters, etc etc.  These still exist some places.  (It is a CD Warehouse, for those of you familiar with the sure-to-soon-be-extinct chain of stores).  This music store is of the “used” music store variety.  You can come in and sell your CDs, and hence, all the CDs for sale are used.  This creates a unique music store experience in two ways:  you rarely find anything newer than about 2 or 3 years ago, and you are able to open the CD packaging and look at the liner notes before you buy anything (the actual CDs are kept behind the counter).

It is when I shop at CD Warehouse that I am reminded how we found music back before the internet.  Aside from radio play, word of mouth, and eventually MTV, we would often go to music stores, look at CDs, and actually buy them, without hearing a note of it, based on:

1.  The band name
2.  The cover art
3.  The album title
4.  The song titles

Sure, this was a kind of crapshoot.  Plenty of people spent money on crappy music they never listened to.  But still, there were big plus sides.  We were invested in this process.  It was important we not waste this purchase.  Now, when you can buy one or two songs off an album for a buck each (after previewing them on YouTube), there is no personal investment.  No time spent poring over possibilities , weighing options, adding up prices in your head.

I have gotten off-topic.  If you want to read about the lost art of buying physical music, there are already tons of places to read about that.  Google it.  It will either make you wish you were young again, or hate crotchety old men like myself who whine about unimportant shit (and don’t get me started on how the current rise of digital music has discouraged most artists from the need to craft 12 actual good songs for an album; why do it, when 90% of their revenue comes from 2 songs off each album?  The result: less actual good music in the world).

So anyway, there I was, perusing the rack at CD Warehouse, not sure what I was looking for, just leisurely waiting for something to catch my eye.  And then, just like in the old days, a perfect confluence of band name, album art, album title, and song titles caught my eye, and I knew immediately what disc I was getting, even though I’d not even remotely heard of the band (nor had I heard of their record label).

The band is called Mexico City, and the album is “Brown Bird”. It has a copyright stamp of 2009.  Some of the song titles I found irresistable are “I Raised an Empire”, “Baby, You’ve Changed”, “Are You Spiritual?”, “The River Followed Me”, and “You Aint Free”.  This is the cover art:

So I get out to my car and put the disc in and WHAMMO!, I am immediately in love.  The first track, “I Raised and Empire”, mixes just about every element of music that I adore, down to lyrical content, singer’s voice, and even the bass tuning.  I continued to drive around for a lot of the morning and into the sunny afternoon, going to the Howard Eaton Reservoir as seen in the previous post and running some light errands, all in all hearing the whole album 2 or 3 times and being floored by every single song.

When I finally got home, I was quite anxious to get online and find out as much as I could about this band.  And I was even more floored to find a very close to zero internet presence by them.  No videos on YouTube (I say again…NONE!), no Wikipedia entry, and with a name like Mexico City, you can imagine standard Google results are difficult to sift through.  They have a MySpace page, and a presence on their label’s website (turns out, they’re an Australian band).  So of course this actually quite pleased the pretentious hipster in me, who LOVES being the only guest at the party.

What an unbelievable find, when you think about it!  In a completely empty, used music store in Erie, Pennsylvania, by pure chance I bought a practically unavailable CD from an Australian band that nobody has ever heard of, and it is perfect for me.  (for more proof that it is down my alley, I copied this from the band’s blurb on their label’s website: “Mexico City is epic garage rock for fans of The Band, Nick Cave,  Dylan, My Morning Jacket, Neil Young and Wilco.”)  I am just so happy that an experience like this can still be had in this day and age.

But of course, while I am happy to be alone at the party, I was still sad the band seemed to have a nil presence on YouTube. (I want people to pay for the music they own, but YouTube is a great jumping-off point for people to learn HOW to spend their music budget.  Plus, before anyone wants to argue it: healthy used music stores are good for musician’s pocketbooks.  Wanna talk about how that works? E-mail me.)  So I real quick made a video for the song that really stood out to me, “The River Followed Me”.  This one really made my hair stand on end the first time I heard it, so I figured this was the one I’d put out there first.  But I hate when people just upload songs with a static picture of some kind, and no visual stimulation, so I took that final step and have become one of these insufferable internet dweebs who make “unofficial” videos of songs as though they think they’re in the band, or they’re some sort of video-maker.  Well, I guess I am what I am, although there’s actually much less pretension here than you might think.  I took all this video in about 30 minutes, and assembled it all in about another 30 minutes.  It is all completely meaningless, disconnected imagery that I thought might just look cool with the song.  The indoor stuff is all in my apartment (completely unfettered shots of how my place actually looks, no staging…except the mirrorball, which I had to turn on for the shot, but which IS out of batteries, which is why it isn’t turning).  The majority of the outdoor stuff is within a 2 block radius of central downtown Erie. (the nearly unidentifiable shot at between 2:06-2:13 is the gazebo in downtown’s Perry Square where the Occupy Erie movement is camped out).  The baseball game is in a city park 3 blocks from my apartment.  Anyway, check it out, this song owns my nads:

 

Howard Eaton Reservoir, 11/1/11

 

 

 

 

 

 

Portrait of the Blogger as an Angel