Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004
I got my copy of The Wilco Book yesterday, and it’s quite an interesting read. A collection of essays, photographs and a sort of guided tour around the world of Wilco, it seems overly arty and pretentious at first glance, but when you sit down and start reading it, you realize that’s just the presentation and the content is actually quite illuminating. You get a moderately in-depth look at the Wilco loft and their equipment, a behind-the-scenes account of life on tour from the band and their techs and a peak at their in-studio creative process. I’m not quite finished yet, but as a fan I’m finding it fascinating. As far as getting into the heads of the band and what makes them tick, it’s more revealing than I Am Trying To Break Your Heart was as it skips over the business and politics and gets right to the art.
I admit that I originally wanted the package more for the 40-minute CD of demos and unreleased tracks that accompanies the book, but that was overestimating the value of the music and grossly underestimating the printed piece. The CD is quite effective as a soundtrack for the book – yes, I made sure to read the latter while listening to the former – but standalone it’s only mildly interesting in an academic sense. Primarily instrumental and with only some of those tracks really qualifying as “songs”. The demos of Ghost tracks “Pure Bug Beauty” and “Hummingbird” are quite nice, but pieces like the closing “Hamami” are little more than sonic experiments. Still, track-by-track liner notes in the appendices go a long way to explaining what the artistic intent was behind each song and give them a certain value, if not listenability. Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised – I half-expected this to be a bit of a rip-off, but it’s really not. Order it from Amazon.ca for a reasonable $25 CDN.
And as a tangentially-related side note, I was listening to the recording of Wilco’s show in Toronto this past October and was tickled to notice that in “Handshake Drugs”, Nels Cline quotes few bars of Tom Verlaine’s “Marquee Moon” solo in one of his guitar breaks. I only really noticed because I was trying to learn the same solo this past weekend. Nels does it better.
It’s the album that just won’t die. A third single from The Postal Service’s Give Up will be released on February 8, more than two years after the album was released. Is that a record of some kind? We Will Become Silhouettes will be b-sided by one new song and two remixes. Billboard has complete details. I’m really amazed at how The Postal Service has trundled along, becoming SubPop’s second-best selling album of all time (behind Nirvana’a Bleach). I guess the USPS motto holds true for the band as well – “Neither snow, nor rain, nor blackest night, no evil will escape their sight–” No wait, that’s the Green Lantern Corps. I always mix them up.
Mogwai have a live mp3 of “2 Rights Make 1 Wrong” performed at this year’s ATP Festival available for download. My favourite Mogwai song ever. Sometimes I just put it on, turn it up and close my eyes.
New Order have confirmed their still-untitled next album will be out in February. I have the date of February 22 jotted down though I’m not sure exactly where that came from.
A look at 4AD’s tenative release schedule for 2005 confirms new albums next year from The Mountain Goats, Tanya Donelly and Mojave 3, as well as some special 25th anniversary releases.
Does anyone remember the Billy & The Boingers: Bootleg Bloom County compendium from 1987? If so, you may recall that the book came with a flexidisc single (that’s for record players, kids – turntables) featuring two songs from the Bill The Cat-led band… Well having never owned the book, I never got a chance to hear the tunes. But now, seventeen years later and thanks to the magic of the internets, I can finally rectify that… And you know what? They’re really not very good. Not that I’m surprised. Listen for yourself. I guess I shouldn’t have been expecting Pet Sounds or something… Get it? Pet Sounds? Bill the Cat? Ha!
np – Stars / Set Yourself On Fire
Monday, November 22nd, 2004
The Nothing I Know brings glad tidings from the long-lost world of Catherine Wheel. After nary a peep being heard since they went on hiatus following the release of 2000’s Wishville, it appears that CW frontman Rob Dickinson has been up to something productive over the past half-decade besides regretting his Ferment liner notes haircut. TNIK, who also has an Adam & Eve-era b-side online for your enjoyment, reports that Dickinson will complete mixing on his debut solo album this week with an eye to a release sometime in 2005. It will be accompanied by some touring, though on which continents, who knows – it’s too early to speculate without even a label in the picture (though apparently Sancutary is in the mix in some capacity). While they never really broke through in North America (see “Waydown”, filed under One-Hit Wonders), the Wheel had/have an inexplicably fanatical following in Toronto. Anyway, apparently the solo material is similar in feel to Catherine Wheel’s 1997 masterpiece Adam & Eve. Good news, indeed.
Oh, and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Brian Futter = Ugliest man in rock. Ever.
Some late links on the topic… I Can’t Believe It’s Not Futter. And Rob Dickinson has a Livejournal impersonator? Who would want to pretend to be Rob? And yet there seems to be legit news. Weird.
Austin City Limits interviewed Wilco at the end of September, presumably when they were taping their episode of the show, set to air January 8. Bright Eyes will also be featured on the show that day.
Lawrence.com plays Q&A with Jay Farrar.
The Black Table has some fun tearing apart musician classified ads on New York’s Craigslist. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that it’s not hard to do so – finding bizarre, hilarious or just plain frightening musician classified ads is like shooting dead fish in a barrel. Mind you, I’ve had some good success with finding like-minded people to play with through sites like Torontomusician (our own Craigslist has almost no traffic), but believe me – the batting average is not good. Now if they wanted to have some real fun, they’d post a fake ad of their own and post some of the responses they got back. It’s like a sociology masters thesis waiting to happen.
Congratulations to the Toronto Argonauts on winning the Grey Cup. I’m not a football fan, but I did watch a little bit of the third quarter and my goodness, Toronto was shredding BC’s defence. I didn’t see one incomplete pass. Impressive stuff, and it’s always nice when the home team wins a championship.
I saw a guy in the subway today pushing a shopping cart full of puppies. Swear to God, he had at least a half dozen of them in there. It was quite possibly the cutest thing ever.
My headphones just broke. That sucks enormously. I have to order a new pair, like, now.
np – Catherine Wheel / Like Cats And Dogs
Sunday, November 21st, 2004
I walked out of The Incredibles last night with the same warm feeling of geek validation that I usually only have from seeing an excellent adaptation of classic material, even though it’s technically an original story. An obvious riff on the Fantastic Four super-hero family dynamic, The Incrdibles pulls off the rare feat of being simultaneously classic and modern.
With the bright, colourful costumes, simple powers and killer robots. there’s a real Golden Age-esque that never gets ironic or campy. The humour is typically Pixar, often understated and subtle (though there are a number of laugh-out-loud sequences), it keeps a grin on the audience’s face through the sheer sense of fun on the screen rather than in-your-face jokes. It also remains enthralling for its entire almost-two hour running time, which is epic-length for an animated feature.
While much of the praise as always goes to Pixar’s animation house, the real strengths of the film (as with all their features thus far) are in the writing and voice acting. I maintain that if The Incredibles‘ had been done in traditional cell animation, it’d still be an exceptional piece of film (though it’d probably still be in production for the next ten years). Craig T Nelson and Holly Hunter are both marvelous as the parents of the titular super-powered brood. Nelson in particular perfectly captures the square-jawed hero sound, kinda like Patrick Warburton without being quite so over the top.
And to get back to the animation for a moment, it’s as exceptional as always. To my memory, this is Pixar’s first film that doesn’t feature anthropomorphisized inanimate objects (read: the first one featuring real people), even if they are exagerratedly comic book-y. The end product looks like superb claymation, so convincing is the three-dimensionality and texturing of the Incredibles’ world. And they had the best CGI hair since Final Fantasy. It’s mind boggling that with each new film, Pixar consistently betters their past work, and not by just a little. Of course, having seen the lacklustre trailer for Cars before the film, I’m banking on that trend to end next November.
So yes, great movie. And it nteresting that they used the name ‘Elasti-Girl’ despite it being a character in DC’s Doom Patrol. I dunno, elastic-powered superheroes have always creeped me out. Mr Fantastic, Elongated Man, Plastic Man… that’s just gross.
And as a perfect comic book-movie chaser, there’s three new episodes of Justice League Unlimited available on bit torrent that haven’t even aired on television yet. Wonder Twins? Ach! The Warren Ellis-scripted episode in particular, “Dark Heart”, has some great dialogue.
And back to the Fantastic Four tangent for a moment, here’s a pic of Julian McMahon in costume as Dr. Doom.
np – Liz Phair / Exile In Guyville
Saturday, November 20th, 2004
The new Decemberists record has a release date, March 22, and they’ve changed the album title from The Infanta to Picaresque. I can just imagine the conversation between Colin Meloy and the label guys at Kill Rock Stars HQ on that one:
KRS: “I don’t know about that title, Colin. I just don’t think the general public is going to understand what ‘Infanta’ means.”
CM: “Well, what if I change it to ‘Picaresque’?”
KRS: “Perfect!”
Of course, regardless of what they ultimately choose to call it, it’ll be one of the most anticipated releases of the year. By me, anyway.
Billboard confirms my theory from the other day that Bright Eyes will be conducting two separate tours to promote their two new albums I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning or Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. The January tour will feature a more conventional band configuration and push Morning, while labelmates and neighbours The Faint will back up Oberst for the more experimental Digital Ash tour which is scheduled to kick off around May.
This week on CBC Radio 3 – a gorgeous photo essay, profile and five live session tracks from Arcade Fire. Tip from Garry.
Merge has released the track lists of their Dinosaur Jr reissues, and those hoping for scads of bonus material will be disappointed. While the much-needed remastering of the records will be welcome to be sure, the bonus materials they’ve dug up for each album are woefully thin. The extra goodies for each album shake out as follows:
Dinosaur – A live version of “Does It Float”
You’re Living All Over Me – videos for “Little Fury Things” and “Just Like Heaven”
Bug – videos for “Freak Scene” and “No Bones”
And that’s it. I guess we’ve all been spoiled by the extensive packages that the likes of Pavement have been getting – maybe sometimes the vaults simply aren’t that deep. Hopefully there’ll at least be good and extensive liner notes from the band. All three reissues are out March 22.
Matthew Sweet gets verbose with Nude As The News, talking about the making of Kimi Ga Suki * Raifu and Living Things, explaining the pottery he’s been selling on tour and remembering the late Robert Quine.
np – Richard Thompson / The Old Kit Bag
Friday, November 19th, 2004
Rilo Kiley fans owe it to themselves to hunt down a copy of the new Live At Fingertips EP which I found in Chicago last weekend. It was recorded at the titular record store (or at least I think it’s a record store?) in Long Beach, California in August of this year on the eve of the release of More Adventurous (pics from the performance here). It contains six tracks from the show, performed mostly unplugged (though Blake is on quiet electric guitar), including the non-album song “Somebody Else’s Clothes” which is as good as anything that made the cut. Besides that treat, the recording quality is excellent and Jenny Lewis’ voice is in marvelous form – well worth the price of admission (which, incidentally, is $8 – you can buy a copy here – the tracklisting is correct but the order is wrong – and you can get a poster of the cover art here).
And speaking of live albums, the Pernice Brothers are streaming selections from their forthcoming live album Nobody’s Listening (the audio half of Nobody’s Watching, which technically refers to the DVD portion) off their website. Go to the news section, linked above, and click on the banner – voila, Bob’s your uncle. Actually, that’d only be true if Joe was your dad.
The Toronto Star gets Frank Black Francis to answer the same questions he’s probably answered a million times already about the Pixies reunion.
Elvis Costello interviews Joni Mitchell for Esquire. From LHB. And while on the topic of Declan, you can watch the video for “Monkey To Man” from The Delivery Man, which features a brief cameo from Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis (around the 53-second mark). And I think I see some other celeb cameos but aren’t sure… It’s a fun vid, apparently he got some inspiration from his appearance in the Austin Powers films.
The new Doves record Some Cities has been pushed back a fortnight from February 15 to March 1. That’s right, I said “fortnight”.
Does anyone have an email with which I can contact Ted Leo or his posse? The contact page on his new website doesn’t work and I want to plead with them to bring some merch to their Toronto show in a couple weeks. Or if not, to at least smuggle a single t-shirt across the border for me… Update: Thanks everyone, I sent Ted an email. And I mentioned the typo on his website.
np – The Sadies / Favourite Colours
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