Awkward Duet - Sons & Daughters - Love the Cup - 2004

A surprisingly delicate cut from S&D, from back in the days when the guitar player used to sing too and pop sheen wasn't there foremost target. I saw these guys open up for Clinic at a CMJ show in 2003 and was thoroughly impressed with their girl/boy harmonies, ability to combine rockabilly instincts with dark noir undertones, and of course the completely unabashed Scottish accents that has since become a much more acceptable strategy (The Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbits, I'm looking at you!).

So I went to go see Polvo in concert at The Belle House last night with some of my long time friends. The show was good, and it was nice to see 90's math rock getting it's due...but my concert experience was definitely shaded by a middle aged, totally sloshed Brit who insisted on wearing his narrow brim fedora through the whole show. Seriously dude, take off your fucking hat! Some of us would actually like to watch the show and not have our view constantly obstructed by your obnoxious affectation. I've never understood the need to display your personality through wardrobe. Why not display your personality through your words and actio...on second though, you're probably an asshole...just take the hat off during a concert so the rest of us can see the show, you limey douchebag.

Auf Achse - Franz Ferdinand - Franz Fredinand - 2004

I knew going up to Boston that The Singh brothers needed to put in a visit with their uncle who had recently moved to Boston. So after a series of phonetags and voicemails it was finally determined that we'd be having dinner with them on Saturday night. Anand got his uncle on the phone and attempted to make arrangements to meet at the restaurant, but his uncle was insistent that he keep dinner a surprise and that we meet up with them at their place in Brighton before dinner.

We took the T out there, which was slow and painful. Once you are out of Boston Central, the train runs above ground on street level. This means that the trains must stop at stop lights...in addition to it's already scheduled stops, making for a frustrating, lurching experience that is only slightly less annoying than taking a bus through Queens.

We finally arrived at our stop on Washington St. and began our relatively short walk to the boys' uncle's house. It was then that I was informed of a situation brewing in our little party. It seems that one member of our party, who shall remain nameless, but was neither Anand nor me...had been having some stomach issues during the trip. This person had purchased some medicine at the CVS the night before to correct this particular stomach issue and had taken some in the morning. When this proved ineffective, he'd taken more in the afternoon...now, several hours later, the medicine was beginning to take hold and he was desperately in need of place to take care of the situation.

When we arrived at the door, it took Uncle Singh several moments to come downstairs, causing the afflicted party to shuffle quite a bit and to occasionally grasp the chain link fence and clinch. Eventually, we were admitted to their very nice residence and Anand and I were left to make small talk and pretend not to notice the amount of time our fallen comrade had been in the bathroom.

Finally, when all was clear, we piled in the car to head to our dinner reservations...which we were already 15 minutes late for.

Most Franz Ferdinand songs sound pretty much the same, and either you like that vibe or you don't. On their first album, I generally like that vibe.

At Least That's What You Said - Wilco - A Ghost Is Born - 2004

This remains one of the few songs on A Ghost is Born that has any value to me. After the tidal wave of hysteria that followed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, AGIB was bound to disappoint most fans. Couple that with Tweedy's decent into vicodan addiction and the relentless touring and media coverage that followed the surprising success of YHF and it's companion film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart and you have an album that was destined to be "difficult" long before it ever went to press.

Even so, it started out perfectly...this song practically creaks under the weight of exhaustion and frustration. Tweedy's broken voice conveys the tone of a man who just can't take it any more and the moment the guitars kick in is the sound of a long brewing breakdown bubbling to the surface despite every attempt to stiffle it.

If only the rest of the album could have maintained this mood instead of veering off into melody deficient jaunts and krautrock experiments...

Assessment - The Beta Band - Heroes to Zeros - 2004

So there we stood at our own temple of football, about to go in. Since Rance was a late addition to the trip, he hadn't gotten tickets with Anand and I. He had actually pulled some strings at work to get into one of the press boxes for the game. We shook hands and wished him luck, feeling bad for him that he'd have to spend the evening relatively sober with work people while we'd enjoy the game from our seats...

Now you have to understand the way it works...games at The Emirates are sold out, pretty much in perpetuity. The unused tickets are announced by the club 2 weeks before the game and then sold back to the populace at face value...but that would mean waiting two weeks before the trip to actually confirm your tickets. The other option, is to go through a website to buy someones season ticket for that game only at extremely marked up prices...which is what we did.

We walked around the stadium looking for our entrance, which was near the away section. The particular game was against Roma...an Italian team. Now as much stick as the stereotypical Brit soccer fan gets for being a hooligan, that's pretty much a passe image...particularly in London. Since the Hillsborough disaster in 89, British soccer games have been pretty tightly controlled. Beyond that, the game has simply become too expensive...working class fans can't afford the tickets anymore and in general this is the population that has nothing to lose by cracking a few heads at a match. Italian fans are another matter all together.

Italian games saw 7 fatal stabbings last year...with Roma being one of the worst offenders. A line of police blocked the entrance to make sure the Italian fans were well behaved...the problem was, we had to walk through this line of police with our illegally purchased tickets.

We were through and in the clear when he saw us. The one cop in the whole world who thought a couple of American tourists with scalped tickets were the biggest threat to security. He closed down on us fast, walking a good 15 feet away from his line of bobbies and stopping us cold and asking to see our tickets.

Anand assuming there was nothing out of the ordinary showed him the ticket...he immediately confiscated it and stated that he was under orders to do so with all scalped season passes. He asked me for mine as well, and I turned it over, while trying to reason with him...but he clearly had a giant stick up his ass. Two stadium attendants and a second cop all came over to him and asked him to just let us in...but he shock his head "I am under orders to confiscate these, I am going to report this to the club and the persons who sold these tickets will have their season passes revoked as well"

Every person who tried to help us was shot down and left shaking their head that anyone could be such a cock. Finally the cop relented enough to give us the two ID numbers so we could try to at least purchase these seats legally. He then gave us a patronizing lecture that began with "Now you two seem like intelligent gentlemen"

We went to the ticket stand and were told that the game was sold out. When I pointed out that we knew for a fact that there were two empty seats, the ticket seller simply said "The club has no comment on that". The fight was over...we were not going to see the game...except fucking last minute Rance. Anand slumped to the ground and it took me a good amount of convincing just to get him to go to a bar so we could at least SEE the game. Our prize at the end of the rainbow had been ripped from us by one gigantic asshole cop...we were pissed.

The Beta Band got most of it's acclaim after "Dry the Rain" made a stellar cameo in High Fidelity. Sadly, the Scots never did much past that...though there subsequent albums weren't bad. This song is actually pretty good...it just sounds like a faster Dry the Rain.

Asphyxiated Circle - Guided By Voices - Half Smiles of the Decomposed - 2004

Jesus, is every song on Half Smiles...in the A's? Such a glut of GBV. This is one of those mid-tempo rockers that crowded most of the later GBV albums, giving them the appearance of being more "even" but in reality they just replaced the weird tracks with boring, if competant tracks...I'm not sure that's a step up.

So we woke up early on the final morning in Scotland. Kick off was at 8PM and we wanted to make sure we could make it back to London with plenty of time to drop off the car, check into the hotel, pick up our tickets, and hopefully get some pregaming in before we had to be to the stadium. We were actually on the road by shortly before 9, which should have put us back at the car rental place by 4...

We cruised our way out of Glasgow, listening to Brits bitch on Talk Radio about how they were considering privitizing the royal mail, callers were calling in irate! Irate I tell you, that the government was considering taking away their rights as British Citizens. Now I'm all for greater government socialism in our country, but really, seriously...how gives a fuck about the mail? When was the last time anyone mailed anything? Privatize it, who cares?

Anyway, as soon as we were clear of Glasgow two things became apparent. The first was that Rance was going to sleep through most of the car ride in the front seat. The second was that Anand was going to drive like Batman. I sat in the back seat taking pictures of the Scottish/English country side and trying to pretend that I wasn't certain that we were going to die in a blaze of twisted metal.

The 7 hour drive from Glasgow to London was done in slightly less than 5 hours. I'm still not sure if Anand ever got a mountain of speeding tickets from the electric cameras, but he certainly broke every traffic law in Great Britain...but on the flipside, we got to London by 2PM.

Asphalt (Interlude) - Amusement Parks on Fire - Amusement Parks on Fire - 2004

After Anand had cleared his stomach of the offending peach whiskey liquor, (and all of his dinner unfortunately) we realized it was nearly 11 o'clock on a monday and that the odds of us finding a hopping bar on the west side were dwindling, so we started to make our way back to the general direction of the hotel.

Seeing as we had a 7 hour drive back to London the next day and then a soccer game to watch, I was fine with heading back to the Hotel, but the guys were insistant that we squeeze as much life out of Glasgow as we could...so back to the college bars on Sauchaugh St. we went.

Possibly because it was still (kinda) my birthday, the young crowd at the bar we ended up at made me feel desperately old and out of place. An absolutely hammered guy bummed a pound off Rance to buy a beer with and then spent the rest of the evening either thanking us profusely or apologizing for being so drunk. Couple made out desperately on couches while drinking liquors in combinations that only inexperience would allow (Cider with a shot of Jaggermeister in it, followed by White Russians?????). We watched one couple and placed bets on which one of them would throw up first...and whether or not it would actually be WHILE they were making out...sadly, we left before it happened, calling it a night and preparing for our long trip back to London.

All of Amusement Parks on Fire's songs sound exactly the same, like a band covering Swervedriver...the only difference is that this one is an instrumental.

Asobi Masho - Asobi Seksu - Asobi Seksu - 2004

The trip was definitely beginning to take it's toll. None of use were kids anymore and 5 days of drinking, traveling, and eating fried foods was wearing us down...so we came home for a late afternoon nap.

After a brief rest, we were back up again and looking for an evening plan. We decided to check out the north west part of town and see how that went. We stopped into a bar called Leibowski's, which amusingly enough had a complete "White Russian Menu". I'm not entirely sure how one makes a variation on the White Russian, but they had a full menu. The bar itself was fairly cool, and I would have liked to have seen it on a night that wasn't Monday. It seemed like the kind of bar that wouldn't be out of place in the less stroller-centric parts of Park Slope. I got some kind of Scotch that had a name that was something about monkeys. I love monkeys. Anand got suckered into doing a shot of Southern Comfort, as the earlier bet finally came around to haunt him...as this decision would also do.

Anyway, we went to a more traditional pub to watch most of the Tottenham v Hull game, to cheer less for Hull than against Tottenham. Sadly Tottenham won with last minute goal. The bar was filled with what we'd pretty much come to consider the standard issue Glasgow bar crowd (again, we were there on a Sunday and Monday, so we were probably not entirely fair on the city) - drunk old men and drunk teenagers. The bar tender however was lovely. I'm fairly sure I announced my intention to marry her.

By the time the game was over it was nearly 10 and our dreams of steak dinner had long since been given up on. We'd all reached our breaking point and were desperately seeking vegetables. We found an Indian restaurant and headed...they were closing in 20 minutes but that wouldn't be a problem as we were not the linger at the table type. We wolfed down our (quite tasty) vegetables quickly and were back out into the night air relatively quickly.

But we were all too full and to drink anymore and Anand was starting to feel queasy from the shot of SoCo on his stomach. You see Anand and I have very different ideas about vomiting. Me, I fight it off tooth and nail...I hate doing and will keep down absurd amounts of booze and spend hours waiting for the spins to stop so I can go to sleep. If I toss, my night is over. I won't drink again, sometimes for days....once for months. Anand on the other hand, will simply say "I'm going over here for a minute", throw up, and be ready to keep going.

It baffles me considerably that he considers throwing a cigarette butt out on the street is littering, but vomiting all over the sidewalk, totally fine.

Asobi Seksu is something of a bipolar band...they're NYC and Tokyo, they're My Bloody Valentine and Shonnen Knife, they're trendy with a hot Japanesse girl for a front woman, they're arty with a disdain for those that would come to see their hot lead singer, and yet they call their band the Japanesse phrase for great sex...I enjoy them when they are My Bloody Valentine, and less so when they are not. This song is one in which they are not.

The Architecht Has A Gun - Chin Up Chin Up - We Should Have Never Lived Like We Were Skyscrappers - 2004

I've been dogsitting for a friend all week, and as such have paid a bit more attention than usual to my neighborhood's sidewalks. As I've been walking the pooch, I've noticed in the past few days that a large number of Christmas Trees have been placed out on the side walk...which makes me wonder: Are the people who kept their trees up hardcore Catholics who actually know that it is appropriate to leave your tree standing until the Feast of the Ephiphany (The 12th Day of Christmas) or is it just that these people were lazy?

I mean sure you have your people who take down the tree on Dec 26th, Christmas is over, time for the tree to go. You have your people who take it down on Jan 1st or 2nd (the end of the holiday season for most of the secular or protestant world) and then you have people who left it up till this week. We've had a weekend since New Years, they could have taken their trees down then. So does that mean my neighborhood actually has that many serious Catholics in it? Or is it simply that my neighborhood has that many lazy fucks in it? These are the questions that weigh on my mind.

Anyway, Chin Up Chin Up does a kind of watered down Modest Mouse thing here with a little bit of swirly keyboards to make sure we know that this was recorded in the middle 2000's and a lackadasical approach to singing that only barely qualifies as such. Nice enough, but doesn't blow me away.

Ants - P.O.S. - Ipecac Neat - 2004

So my girlfriend made a couple of efforts about 3-4 months into our relationship to get me into Hip Hop and made me a couple of mixes before realizing that I was never going to be 100% okay with listening to it. People will often apologize to me in cars or hanging out in parties when hip hop is playing, usually with a "I know you don't like hip hop"...which isn't actually true. I sort of like this song for instance...it's more a matter of I will never be okay being a hip hop fan.

I realize the cultural baggage is mostly my own, but I still have it. My relationship to hip hop needs to be taken in context. My first exposure to it was relatively late, and that depends on whether or not you count The Beastie Boys first album. I was a teenager at the time when MTV (back when it actually showed music) was starting to play hip hop to the exclusion of rock music. This pitted me in a sort of cultural war...Hip Hop was "winning" and I didn't much care for what that meant for the music I like. Beyond that as a person who started first and foremost as a fan of Beatle-esque pop, early 90's hip hop was the very antithesis of that. Virtually without melody, it was beats and rhymes set to clunky rhythms. It was all poise and posture, and no "Art" as my 16 year old brain defined it.

But beyond that, my reticence springs more from the racial issue...ah the dreaded racial issue. To me, where I grew up, you were belittled by both sides for listening to hip hop. You of course got your racist red neck Hoosiers who claimed you were betraying your people by listening to "Black People Music"...but what effected me more (I can always ignore redneck idiots) was the perception by the few African-Americans in my town that any white person listening to hip hop was doing so to appropriate "blackness" as a way of being cool, that as we had done with Jazz, Blues, and Rock before we were co-opting their style cause our own was too lame.

Well, now a new generation has come of age, one that exists after the culture war has been lost and the appropriation is mostly complete. Most hip hop concerts these days are too pricey for anyone but white suburbanites to go too, and it's harder edges have been replaced by cartoon thugs and jesters. The world's relationship to Hip Hop is in a different place, but I will never be able to shake the feeling that if the person next to me on the subway heard what was coming out of my iPod headphones they're thought would be "Jesus, what a fucking poser".

The Angels Share - Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - Shake The Sheets - 2004

I am such a gigantic fan of Ted Leo's The Tyranny of Distance that the downfall he's taken into didactic political screacher is an increasingly difficult burden to bear. Don't get me wrong, I agree with most of his politics...that's the problem. It's preaching to the choir. I doubt there are many Ted Leo fans out there who think that us being in Iraq is a good idea, or that have no problem with the damage that W has done to The Constitution...so why the hell is Ted screaming about it?

On TToD Ted was a tuneful songsmith, singing intelligently about relationships and the trials of adulthood. I miss that guy.

Having said all of that, The Angel's Share is one of the better of Ted's political songs.

Anecdote - Ambulance LTD - LP - 2004

In some ways it's ridiculous to think that 2004 was all that long ago...but on the other hand, when I think of the things that have occurred since then: Most of one presidential term, yet another election build up, yet another olympics, yet another leap year...I'm two apartments and two women further down the road (and let's not count the birthdays)...and perhaps more tellingly, we are closer to 2010 now than we are the 90's.

I suppose the irony is that I have no Anecdote to tell about Anecdote...mostly just that it made me think of sitting in my room in my apartment back in Greenpoint in 2004. The song just sounds like that year.

Alms - The Futureheads - The Futureheads - 2004

The Futureheads represent an intersting phenomenon...I heard this album, fell in love, listened to it for about a month, got bored, and four years later have yet to get unbored with it. I respect the album, and keep it around with the idea that at some point I will want to hear it again...but every time it comes up, I find myself hitting the next button.

All The Trees Of The Field Will Clap Their Hands - Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans - 2004

Sufjan and his banjo sing about Jesus.

I'm profoundly ambivalent about Sufjan...well, ambivalent might not be the right word...let's go with conflicted. On one hand he's a great number of things I hate: precious, kinda fey, way too mellow, "spiritual"...but then on the other hand he can write one hell of a melody. Even this song with it's banjo's, it's biblical allusions, and it's relentless twee-ness is still almost insufferably catchy...and the guy does know how to keep his cloying tendancies enough at bay that they don't overwhelm...usually.

All New Friends - Dirty On Purpose - Sleep Late for a Better Tomorrow - 2004

I saw Dirty on Purpose back in the winter of 04-05 as an opener for Rogue Wave...I came away thinking that Dirty on Purpose was the much better band. (that show was actually the end of the my enjoyment of Rogue Wave...I had no idea they'd be so fucking California) so I picked up this EP.



At the time of the show my then-girlfriend and I noted the sort of Linda McCartney quality of the keyboard player. She didn't really seem to do much and almost certainly was someone's girlfriend...by the time of their LP she was removed from the band. But if nothing else, she did contribute one good song to the LP...or at least sang on it.

All My Hammocks Are Dying - Chin Up Chin Up - We Should Have Never Lived Like We Were Skyscrapers - 2004

Like most Chin Up Chin Up songs the title is better than the song. Still, the song ain't bad. Nice use of banjo.

All Hands Against His Own - The Black Keys - Rubber Factory - 2004

As I mentioned in my previous post about The Black Keys, I loved the blues as a teenager, but rejected it in the my 20's only to relatively recently re-embrace it. During the heat of the early mid-90's indie rock movement (which pretty much corresponds with the end of my high school/beginning of my college career) there was sort of a notion that we needed to abandon anything that had to do with the corporate beheometh that modern rock music had become. The blues was sort of a part of that. The blues had been co-opted by ageing boomer Eric Clapton, and was the underpinning for all of that flaccid and slick cock-rock that pop metal had become. It was the denizen of classic rock dinosaurs like Zeppelin and God help us all The Doors, or cheesey clothed revisionists like Stevie Ray Vaughn. It was what your middle aged uncle listened to while still insisting he was "cool".

But there is one thing that the blues gets that 95% of mid-nineties indie rock did not, and that is SEX. Put on any Pavement album, any Superchunk or Built To Spill album, and you will find very few songs about fucking. So much overt sexuality had been forced into the music in the 80's and the rise of MTV...combine this with the stringent PC attitude towards traditional gender roles and a generation of kids raised with the belief that the AIDS crisis would turn the future USA into something sort of like Children of Men and you get the almost prudish music of the Alternative Nation era.

I think this is one of the reasons rock lost so many fans to hip-hop during this time. Kids didn't want to hear about how mad we were at corporate oligarchy, or how low our self esteem was cause we weren't cool in high school. They wanted to hear about bumping uglies.

And that's part of why I've re-discovered the blues...thanks in no small part to bands like The Black Keys who can be smart and original in their sound while still working in a style that is now well over a century old...and they don't shy away from the fact that this is music about the things we do late at night with the lights out, or in the back of your grandfather's van in a K-mart parking lot. Really, it's okay to be a little dirty...it's how we all got here...aside of you test tube freaks.

Ageless Beauty - Stars - Set Yourself On Fire - 2004

So I was recently given a new team of developers to manage, and like many developers they are somewhat prickly folks. As they hadn't really taken to me, I was starting to feel a bit like Lt. Goreman in Aliens...the callow commander without the respect of his troops. So, I fixed this in the only way an Irishman knows how. By going out drinking with them and displaying my inner rock star. This also ended up involving karaoke...I'm not sure how, exactly, I ended up singing both Rick Astley and Mr. Big...but it seemed to have done the trick. Also, So-Co and Lime shots on an empty stomach, always a terrible, terrible decision.

I'm into this Stars song. Occasionally, there music can be a bit fey for my tastes, but this one has the right mixture of 90's girl-rock/Canadian-collective rock to keep me happy....Belly as backed by Broken Social Scene if you will. Decent stuff.

AFK - Pinback - Summer in Abaddon - 2004

If only Pinback always showed this much grit. Don't get me wrong, I love this band, and Blue Screen Life is probably one of the indie-pop records of the decade. But if you've never seen them live, you can be forgiven for not realizing how much punk they've got in their hearts. Beneath their San Diego comic book stoner groves lurks more than a little bit of Bad Brains and Big Black. Seeing them live makes this abundantly clear.

I took a former girlfriend to see them on the Abaddon tour. When they kicked into this song here immediate response was "Holy Shit, who knew these guys loved Fugazi?" Who knew, indeed.

It's nice to have the breezy charms of Pinback as they are, but seriously, when you can kick this much ass (Even while singing another nerdy song about computers) why not kick that ass as much as possible? A question for the ages.

Incidentally, I once put this song on a party playlist back to back with Slint's Good Morning, Captain hoping someone would get the joke. No one did.

Aeroplane Blues - The Black Keys - Rubber Factory - 2004

So, all in all I had a pretty spectacular weekend, but one of my favorite parts (well, that I'm telling you all about anyway) happened on Saturday afternoon. After watching my beloved Arsenal pull of an amazing comeback (down a man, and two goals with less than 1/2 an hour to play...comeback to win 2-3) I went with my buddy to a local pub and sat in the back yard with a couple of beers. As we basked in victory, I couldn't help but enjoy the kick off of my favorite season of the year...outdoor drinking time. Few things are better in this city than sitting on a sidewalk, in the sun, with a cold beverage and watching the world go by. I love this shit. After the long hard slog that is winter, it's finally time to participate in my favorite past time.

The only thing that could have made the experience better would have been some cool tunes. The Black Keys would have worked. Their laid back bluesy stomp is just about perfect for outdoor drinking. Bring it on, boys.

Act Nice and Gentle - The Black Keys - Rubber Factory - 2004

Back before I discovered punk, I thought I wanted to be a blues guitarist. Teenage Indiana Josh (that's a teenage Josh that lived in Indiana, not some young world hopping archaeologist) would sit in his grandparents basement with a Japanese Strat and a ridiculous Blues Brothers fedora playing pentatonic scales and whining about how the women were doing him wrong. I like The Black Keys, cause their like that Josh never left the blues stage...and actually became good at it.

This particular song is a bit more laid back than usual. They seem to be riding a nice The Band kinda vibe, which I'm all for. I feel like I should be sipping a mint julep on a porch swing.

Damn, I wish it was summer. And I wish I had a porch swing...and a mint julep. Where's a genie when you need one?