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July 10, 2006
Largehearted List - July 10, 2006
Here are the eleven music blog posts I found most interesting in the past week, presented alphabetically by blog name
Aropax Nation listed five "high-rotation three-minute pop songs."
#1 Camera Obscura - Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken
Throwing of the shackles of Belle-and-Sebastian wannabes, Glasgow's other cardigan pop band show what they're made of with a lovesick swoon of a Motown number. The chorus is so infectious and Traceyanne Campbell's vocals so addictive that it should come with a health warning.
Ashcan Rantings listed its best albums of 2006 with accompanying haikus.
Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
With a voice like no
other, she sings with power
and true perfection.
Bradley's Almanac profiled Boston band Buffalo Tom, and shared their June Boston performance.
For me, Buffalo Tom is the quintessential Boston band. Around since 1987 with nary a lineup change, the trio's continued existence is a testament to hanging in there just for the love of making music with friends. No massive stylistic changes over time, peaks and valleys of popularity, from indies to majors and now on their own, but always three guys playing solid songs.
Earvolution listed its ten best books about rock and roll.
What follows is a list, in no particular order, of the ten greatest books ever written about rock and roll. As you will see, it doesn't always have to be non-fiction to delve into the psyche of rock music, grasp the artistic essence of a generation or provide insight into the music that probably plays too large a role in some of our lives. It's only rock and roll, but we like it.
Good Hodgkins examined the "Garden State effect."
There’s a very vocal part of me that wants my artists to starve. And I don’t mean actually starve: if that were the case I would’ve never started a website that promotes the music I like. Maybe what I mean is “remain vital,” which doesn’t necessarily equate to “remain poor” (but it usually does). Preferrably, I’d be able to listen to the bands I like for as long as they continue to make music, and in a perfect world that music would continue to mean as much to me as it did two years ago as it did five years ago as it did ten years ago.
Great Body of Water finished its "Bands A to Z" feature with a huge download.
Well guys, it took three months, 57 bands, 138 songs and many many posts to bring you some great bands for EVERY letter of the alphabet. You've seen ome gret interviews, guest writers and exclusive mp3's and there are only more interviews to come. (New featurette on the horizon: 10 Questions With GBOW)
Marathonpacks debuted its podcast with a summer songs edition.
Well, I've gone and done it. Seventy minutes of me blathering on about songs that work well with summer, and some that remind me of past summers.
rbally shared the recent Toronto "Broken Mascis Scene" show.
Honest to goodness, this is some great stuff, a reminder of why J. is a guitar god . . . and, listening to Thumb with BSS-provided horns and flute is simply amazing.
Status Ain't Hood listed the quarter's best albums.
This hasn't been a great three months for albums. There hasn't been anything much worth obsessing over, and a lot of the great work that's surfaced lately (Lily Allen, Lupe Fiasco, Johnny Cash, Rhymefest, TV on the Radio) wasn't commercially available during the April-to-June window I'm working with here. Since Fishscale and King, commercial rap albums have gone into creative hibernation, and virtually everything we've heard lately has been on some depressingly shitty and borderline insulting singles-plus-filler nonsense.
Said the Gramophone had one of my favorite music critics, Carl Wilson, wax poetic on Pere Ubu.
As so often, in a group that always made its art from the parts that weren’t supposed to matter in culture, from B-movies and sci-fi novels and comics and Germanic freak rock and abandoned buildings and obsolete synthesizers and dinosaur books, Pere Ubu digs for inspiration in the trash: Here it’s the opening sequence of the boneheaded 1970s TV show The Six-Million-Dollar Man, in which the surgeons intone over the prone body of the astronaut, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” And somehow, presumably with bits of early microwaves, Soviet satellites and HAL-9000, they call the fallen man to rise, to run fast in slow motion, to face supervillains and (not incidentally) fembots -- too good to be good, much less true.
Theme Park Experience explained its love for the music of Henry Rollins.
When I was a sophomore in high school, Henry Rollins really spoke to me and my friends. Thanks to MTV's constant playing of Rollins Band's "Liar," I felt like I was hearing a song by a guy who could really tap into my teenage angst. Sure, a band like Nirvana supposedly spoke to more people with abstract lyrics, but when I was in high school and was very angry about various matters, "Liar" was intensely personal and explicit. Now when I listen to the song, I really can't get into it. Not that there is a lack of anger in me, but I can't into this kind of expression of anger. That said, I can't underscore enough how important certain other works from Rollins are to me.
