Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

Where Are You Now?

Many thanks to Brad of Bradley’s Almanac for shanghai-ing Mark Gardener at his show in Boston on Sunday (of which Drive Blind also has a review) and getting him to pose with this “You’re Reading Chromewaves.net (And I Wrote Chrome Waves!)” sign – I swear I did not put him up to it. For those unfamiliar with my about page, the name of this blog was taken from the song “Chrome Waves” on Ride’s Going Blank Again album – which Mr Gardener wrote.

He recently released his first proper solo album These Beautiful Ghosts, which I only just got a copy of. Credited to Gardener and Goldrush, initial impressions are that it’s much better than I expected, though with all due respect to Mr Gardener, I didn’t really expect much. That’s not meant as a personal slight on Mark, but just past experience has shown that for some reason, the whole of British bands tend to be so much more than just the sum of their parts. I can’t count the number of lacklustre solo efforts that have come from members of great British bands, and I would count Mark’s Animalhouse project among those. These Beautiful Ghosts has a nice, laid back vibe that’s similar in parts to the jangly classicism of Carnival Of Light, with just enough production and full band backing from Goldrush to avoid sounding like a strummy singer-songwriter record, though at the core that’s what it is, albeit a pleasant one. I don’t know how heavy rotation it’ll really get, but it’ll still surely be more than Tarantula… Check out some of the songs at Mark’s MySpace page.

Gardener is in town at Lee’s Palace tonight backed by Goldrush and supported by Hopewell. I’m probably not going to be able to make it, but can at least enjoy the recording Brad made of his Boston show. And here’s a scan of a brief interview Gardener gave to Under The Radar for their Fall issue.

Goldrush’s country flavour have elicited a number of Mojave 3 comparisons for These Beautiful Ghosts – and coincidences, Pitchfork has a brief interview with Neil Halstead about the new M3 album, wherein he reveals the album title (Puzzles Like You) and release date (March 7). YAY.

JAM! talks to Calexico’s John Convertino about working with Iron & Wine on In The Reins, as well as their new album Garden Ruin which is out on April 11. The Boston Herald, meanwhile, talked to Sam Beam about the same. Calexico and Iron & Wine are at the Docks in Toronto this Friday.

Check out some live footage of Wilco playing “Kicking Television” (WMV), via Prefix. I’ve compared the audio with the track that appears on Kicking Television, and I believe they are the same. Yay, the aborted DVD is leaking to the internet! Update: One reader has reported that the video link is loaded down with spyware and other nastiness. Bizarre, but I am disabling the link just in case. If you want to risk it, cut and paste : http://mfile.akamai.com/9139/asf/stream.wmg.com/
wmi/uk/wilco/KickingTelevision_Hi.asx

Said The Gramophone wraps up their 22 favourite singles of 2005, all with downloads and wonderfully-written annotations.

Thanks to Lora for following up on the NME year-end list-fixing scandal I mentioned last week. While Londonist were persuaded by NME‘s lawyers to remove their post, a copy lives on here and The Guardian reported on the story with a little more info (including confirming Londonist’s story about the interim list looking quite different from the final one). Innnnteresting.

And no, still no sign of Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister – Live at iTunes… but Matador promises it’s coming.

np – Saturday Looks Good To Me / All Your Summer Songs

By : Frank Yang at 8:53 am
Category: Uncategorized
RSS Feed for this post15 Responses.
  1. Gary Campbell says:

    Frank — too bad you’ll miss the show tonight. I’ll fire you a full report tomorrow AM.

  2. sam says:

    congrats on the Gardener sign/pic, Frank!!
    it must’ve felt pretty good seeing that :)

  3. punky! says:

    omigosh! That picture RULES! :)

  4. angryrobot says:

    Man, I was really disappointed when that B&S download didn’t appear. I hope somebody gets their act together; I was really looking forward to it.

    (yes, I am blogging again)

  5. Jon says:

    your Wilco link contained something that has given me a nasty enough case of spyware, that I have to switch work PC’s – this was happening anyway, but I’m hastening this migration. Something was whacky from the 1st moment I clicked it – and I now have a billion random popup windows opening up. I don’t know if other people have experienced this or not, but you should remove the link to play it safe.

  6. Frank says:

    weird – I didn’t have any problem last night, but I will have to run ad-aware when I get home tonight just in case. thanks for the heads up.

  7. graig says:

    Frank, time to get excited,
    check it:
    http://www.tvshowsondvd.com

  8. brads says:

    FYI, the live ‘…Sinister’ is now up at iTunes.

  9. Shawn says:

    fucking awesome picture..

  10. Mike says:

    Love the photo…the penultimate achievement of Chromewaves.net! Frank you are a cyber star!

  11. Mike says:

    Wilco has that same clip of "Kicking Television" on their site in the Roadcase section: http://wilcoworld.net/roadc… You probably need the latest Quicktime to watch it, though the quality is better. And not to nitpick, but the album version of the song is different. Maybe Tweedy thought this was the least boring take.

  12. Ryan Waddell says:

    Ummm… How can a .ASX file contain spyware? It loads up Windows Media Player right away, and the page contains no other information. So I think Jon’s spyware woes are from some other source.

  13. dave park says:

    I got the link straight off Virgin’s web site and I’ve never ever experienced any issues with spyware from any off any of their links. Thx for the link Frank.

  14. fyang says:

    is the return of its namesake – http://t.co/RZwdzzqzIT – a good enough reason to resurrect my blog? cc: @bradleysalmanac @MarkGardener

  15. ROCKthusiast says:

    I say $#@% yeah! #RideReunion RT @fyang is the return of its namesake – http://t.co/ZtnDJ8zfhZ – a good enough reason to resurrect my blog?