I don’t generally go in for bloggy quiz things, but I saw a link to this “What Sort of English Do You Speak?” quiz on Jeff’s Blog and had to try it. Actually managed to do a pretty decent job of pinning me down (early childhood in western Mass, followed by an adolescence in Michigan – which is, apparently, considered Upper Midwest?). Sadly it didn’t have “Tonic” as an option for what you call a fizzy soft drink (not that I use it, but I wish I did).

Your Linguistic Profile::

40% General American English

30% Yankee

20% Upper Midwestern

5% Dixie

0% Midwestern

This marks the first time I’ve managed to finish a letter’s worth of listening and written up the blog entry in the same day. As usual, all songs are mp3’s on my website and may go away at any point (though, the A’s are still up, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it). Not much in the way of voting on the B’s, so not sure if anyone is reading this or downloading these, but here goes.

Aline – Censure
Still more French, female vocalist pop. This one has the advantage of some of the strangest arrangement decisions I’ve heard in a pop song in a while – horns, strange guitar parts, crazy drum fills, voices over loudspeakers, jarring alarm sounds. I really enjoyed it.

Theya Hermann – Champagne & The Starlite
A little web research reveals I grabbed this from Fluxblog a while ago and apparently forgot about it before I could listen. I’m sort of in a cabaret mood lately (especially after seeing Casey Dienel, which I’ll write about sometime), so this certainly went over well. I would certainly recommend this one to anyone would like to hear a Bat Out of Hell-era Meat Loaf song by an idiosyncratic female singer.

Page France – Chariot
Page France has been described to me as “a Christian version of the Mountain Goats,” but I’m not really hearing it (either the Christian content or the Mountain Goats similarity). This song is fairly lush indie-folk-chamber-pop. Very enjoyable.

Fishboy – Cheer Up, Great Pumpkin!
Not only does this have a fantastic title (really, about half the songs on this Fishboy album have fantastic titles), but the song is pretty darn great. The vocalist may rub some people the wrong way (he’s somewhere in between Sean Tollefson from Tullycraft/Crayon/Six Cents and Natalie and Jad Fair from Half Japanese), but the song has some nice arrangements, and, really, I’m a sucker for any song where a somewhat yelly chorus jumps in for just one or two lines of a song. I think my first attempt at describing this song was as a low-budget Polyphonic Spree, which is not entirely off-base.

Elgin Park – Crush ‘78
I picked up an Elgin Park demo on the basis of Mike Andrews’ scoring work, but never got around to listening to it (which is, as you may have noticed, a bit of a pattern here). This song is really, really close to the border between resonant and cheesy, but manages to fall slightly on the resonant side for me. It’s also the second song here to mention gas shortages, which strikes me as odd.

The Tiny – Closer
This letter’s band from Sweden, this song is very pretty, if verging a little closer to AAA singer-songwriter than I usually veer (again, I’m blaming Casey Dienel for my heightened tolerance for this sort of thing).

Tiny Tim – The Coming Home Party
My familiarity with Tiny Tim is probably less than it should be. As a child, I was certainly aware of him as a celebrity and enjoyed singing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” with my parents. By the time I hit college, he was in mid-comeback – recording albums with Brave Combo, all of which I played on my radio show. I tended to prefer his recordings of older, Tin Pan Alley songs over his more novelty-ish covers of classic rock songs (though, those are pretty good too). Strangely, I never thought to go back and listen to God Bless Tiny Tim, until I grabbed it from YME before that got shut down. I still haven’t sat down and listened to it all the way through, but everything I’ve heard has been fantastic. Lots of incredibly insane, lively covers of fairly obscure old songs. I believe this one is an original and pretty fantastic.

So, now we’re up to the beginning of May. At this point, things are getting pretty crazy at work, so I spend both Monday and Tuesday working until around 8:30 or 9 at night. Not a lot of fun, but good to get lots of code out. Wednesday (this being May 3rd) we head out to Holocene to go see Irving and the Essex Green. Irving is one of those bands that seemed to be a big deal back in LA, but I managed to avoid seeing them or even hearing anything beyond a stray mp3 or two. Mostly I knew them as being the band that Shana from Let’s Go Sailing used to be in, so I figured they couldn’t be that bad.

I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they arrived too late to do a soundcheck pre-show, so that’s why they spent 30 minutes soundchecking before their set. But, still, my tolerance for a band decreases every time they complain about their monitors, which Irving did several dozen times. Monitors aside, they seemed pretty pleased with their performance – certainly more pleased than I was. Most of the songs were kind of boring – was easy to pick out the era/style each song was influenced by, but almost none of them were remotely catchy, which is sort of a requirement for a pop band. Maybe one song that could be considered decent.

Anyway, they finally stopped, and the Essex Green took the stage. About ten minutes to set up equipment, no soundcheck, just straight to the rock. All but three or so of the songs were off their new album, which I still haven’t heard, but I enjoyed the set quite a lot nevertheless. I started to drag a bit about two-thirds of the way through (it now being about 12:30 or so, thanks to Irving’s lengthy setup), but then the band performed one of the best executed breakdowns in a live performance I’ve ever seen. The entire band stopped on a dime, the drummer lept to his feet, and they all started clapping in time, while singing. Outstanding. The drummer, overall, was really excellent, and certainly seemed to be enjoying himself. I’m sure I will not be the first person to mention that he looks and acts uncannily like Nick Andropolis from Freaks and Geeks. All-in-all, an excellent show.

An excellent show, which, combined with a couple late nights of work, left me a little exhausted for the rest of the week and into the weekend. Another relaxing weekend, marked largely by the return of our neighborhood farmer’s market. Not really terribly exciting produce-wise (mostly potatoes at this point), but good to have it back. Went to a pretty decent Lebanese restaurant for lunch one day and saw yet another mediocre movie (Lucky Number Slevin – which was inordinately pleased with itself for a plot twist that could be accurately predicted by intoxicated chimps). We’ve been on kind of streak of really unimpressive films lately. I’m hoping something good will wind up at the $3 theater soon, otherwise might have to head downtown to one of the real theaters. Anyone recommend anything good that’s out? Or am I really better off just working my way through my stack of arty films from the library?

Enough talking about my dull little life! Time for some music. As I mentioned previously, I’ve been listening to everything I own (or, at least, everything I own in a digital format – still haven’t started ripping the vinyl yet) in alphabetical order by song title. The biggest advantage is that I get to hear songs I haven’t heard before, and these selections are things I’ve come across that I’ve never heard before and impressed me. All links are to mp3’s on my server and will be up until I get around to taking them down.

Benji Cossa – Big Lights on the City Strip
Like, I’m assuming, most people, I didn’t learn about Benji Cossa until Tullycraft covered him. I got the retrospective that Magic Marker put out a while back just as I was starting this alphabetical listening plan, so am listening to it in very small chunks. This was the first one of his songs that really impressed me. There’s a line in the trailer for the Daniel Johnston movie in which someone says (and I’m paraphrasing quite a bit here) that you listen to him, and you start to hear the full orchestration in your head. I’m not sure I buy that with Daniel Johnston, but I certainly buy it with this song.

All of My Brother’s Girlfriends – Breakfast
Another Scandanavian band I know nothing about. All of these obscure Swedish bands are likely coming from the same place – the fantastic Hello! Surprise guide to Swedish pop music. If you like this, or the Laakso song I posted last time, probably worth wasting a couple hours there.

BC Camplight – Blood and Peanut Butter
Despite the kind of awful song name, I really liked this one. It’s certainly very 00’s-y (it’s a little troubling that there is such a sound), but enjoyable. Seems like this could be big among people who don’t generally like my musical taste…

Creekbird – Be A Sweetheart
This is from Creekbird’s new-ish album, which I still haven’t heard, but this song is pretty great. A little less circus-y sounding than his last album, but still keeps enough of the fun, vaguely Tiny Tim-influenced, sound.

Monique Thubert – Booff
I have a whole lot of French stuff, due to a massive mp3 trade with my friend (the friend who suggested the whole alphabetical listening thing, in fact), including many compilations of 60’s French female-sung pop. This is one of those, but is less ye-ye (which is good, but a little samey) and more… odd. My French isn’t good enough to translate, so maybe someone with a better grasp of the language will explain it to me.

Bitesize – Bed & Breakfast
I have been told that Bitesize were pretty big on KSPC shortly after I left, but I had never heard of them until I was advised to pick up their album for a buck at an Aron’s parking lot sale. An excellent investment. I picked “Understudy” at random for a road trip mix CD a couple years ago and really liked it, but never got around to listening to the whole album. This song is as good, or better. But I have a high tolerance and appreciation for male singers with annoying voices and slightly out of tune female vocalists, so others may not care for this one as much.

Tinyfolk – Bella’s Birthday
A track from the online compilation Recycling the Throwaways, which I highly recommend (at least what I’ve heard of it). I know nothing about this band (as is sort of usual for these picks), but I enjoy a nice, sloppy twee folk song as much as the next guy (and, most of the time, significantly more)

Comments always welcome (particularly since I’m nosy and like to know who likes which songs)

Weekend after the Jandek show, I was kind of beat after my road trip of the previous weekend, so we planned a nice quiet couple of days. Eleanor was volunteering at a plant sale on Saturday morning, so I bummed around and worked on a side programming project I’ve been working on. Rest of the weekend was quiet (I think we went to see Match Point, which was not particularly good – unless you are able to buy Scarlett Johansen as alluring, in which case it might work better for you), as was the following week. We’d been told by local Portlanders that the nightlife (at least as far as interesting bands playing) really shuts down during the winter, which seemed to be the case, but gets pretty hectic as the weather gets nicer. (I should pause to point out here that the weather has been fantastic – sunny, but not too hot)

Show hecticness seems to have commenced, as we had our choice of shows on Friday. Either go see the Blow open for Scout Niblett or see Boat open for Jon Auer (of the Posies and the recent incarnation of Big Star). Boat was just signed to Magic Marker – I tend to trust Curt’s taste and he put us on the guest list, so we went to go see Boat. Took a little bit to find the venue. My inability to remember numbers correctly is starting to become a problem now that I live in a city where half the streets are numbered – we spent 30 minutes looking for SW 24th Pl, which doesn’t exist, instead of SW 20th Pl, which does. Once we found the club and parking, we learned that the bands were starting late, since the Mercury had printed a later start time. Not bad, though, as we got to hang out with friends before the show and catch up a bit. Boat were really very good. They’ve got a whole lot of songs available for download on their website. I’m going to go ahead and recommend “Lanterns & Laughing Ladies.” They’re going to be on tour this summer, so I will encourage everyone to go see them if they can.

Jon Auer was, well, depressing. Very depressing. His solo stuff sounds nothing at all like The Posies, and most of the songs were very very bleak. He was clearly aware of his bleakness and joked about the Prozac shipment coming in any minute now, but then continued to play more songs about death and his rather hefty body size. And a cover of “Baby Bitch” by Ween. I think that was the point at which two of our friends left. We made it through a song about being six feet under ground, before we called it quits and went to hang out with them. Boat eventually gave up as well, so they came out to hang out with us. After the show was done, we all went for doughnuts at Voodoo Doughnut, which was quite excellent. I went with the Fruit Loops doughnut.

Rest of the weekend was uneventful. Checked out a new comic shop that was actually pretty decent – main focus seems to be on indie titles, but still has a good selection of the mainstream and quasi-mainstream stuff. And they inexplicably had a full selection of the 33 1/3 series by Continuum, so I picked up Franklin Bruno’s book on Armed Forces. Went to see Night Watch at the $3 theater, which was both bludgeoning and soporific, then came home and watched Sympathy for the Devil, which I’d had out from the library forever. I enjoyed it, as I appear to have a very high tolerance for incredibly pretentious French film, but I’m not entirely sure I got what Godard was getting at with this one.

All of which gets me up to the beginning of May…

I suspect not everyone reading this is familiar with Jandek. The wikipedia entry on him is pretty comprehensive and a good place to start, but I first started listening to him back in my days as a DJ at KSPC. We had a pretty sizeable stack of his albums in the library, and there was pretty rampant speculation about them among DJs. My favorite theory was that all of the albums (at this point, there were probably about 20 of them) had been recorded in one weekend session in the mid-70’s, and he had been releasing it in chunks ever since. The changing cast on each album (there are no credits on the albums, of course) simply reflected various people wandering in and out of the house.

A couple years ago (shortly after the documentary about him – in which he never appears – was released), Jandek started perfoming live in Scotland with Richard Youngs and Alexander Neilson as his backup band. Since then, he’s played maybe a dozen shows – all but two of which were in Europe. Needless to say, I was pretty surprised when a routine search on Upcoming.org showed that he was not only playing in Portland, but playing at the movie theater a few blocks from my house as part of a Film and Music Festival that was being sponsored by a local record store and video store. I immediately emailed the record store to find out about tickets, and, several weeks later, camped out in front of their shop for about an hour before they opened when the tickets were scheduled to go on sale. I was surprised, and a little disappointed, that the line of people waiting outside consisted of just three of us, but was pleased to be able to get my hands on the tickets.

Night of the show, Eleanor and I walked over to the theater about an hour before the show was to start. We ended up roughly second in line, which meant we ended up with 4th row center seats (the first two rows being reserved for employees of the sponsoring stores). One of the festival organizers gets up and announces that Corwood Industries (Jandek’s label) has requested that all cell phones be turned off, that noone re-enter the theater in the middle of a song, and that all cameras are prohibited. Then, Jandek (who is now about 60 or so, rail-thin, and dressed in a very sharp black suit and hat) walks on-stage, plugs in his guitar, and starts playing. His backup band here consisted of Sam Coomes (from Quasi) and Email Amos (from the Grails), who were significantly more rocking than either the other performers on Jandek albums or the other backup bands he’s used live (who tend to come from a more free-jazz background).

Jandek’s guitar playing is pretty unique. He mostly plays in open tunings, with almost no chord changes per song. Most of the expression and variation comes from his picking technique, which is idiosyncratic to say the least. The more rockin’ backup band (as well as the insane amounts of reverb on Jandek’s amp) made it out (instrumentally at least) like an extremely abstract/experimental set from some sort of desert instrumental band (i.e., Scenic, Giant Sand, Calexico) The vocals, on the other hand, were very much Jandek – straight-forward, but sort of hypnotic. Sample couplet: “I like you. I know other guys like you, but I like you too.” This was repeated a few times, alternated with the fairly majestic instrumental breaks. Pretty great stuff. At no point did he look at or talk to the audience, except for a gesture to the two women who got up on stage to sing backup (which consisted solely of the line “Whose mister is this?”)

All in all, a pretty fantastic show. Even Eleanor, who had never listened to Jandek before, enjoyed the show quite a lot. If anyone out there gets the chance to see him, take it.

(Events described herein occur on the week of April 10th)

I realize my plan to catch up on missing blog entries is somewhat doomed to failure if I continue with the pace of writing a summary of one week’s worth of activities every week, so I’m going to have to step it up a little here. I’m not quite used to the sudden flurry of activity after the very nice, slow pace of winter.

Anyway, Wednesday (this being Wednesday, April 19th) I got in the car and started driving south. I got a very early start (around six in the morning), and it was a lovely, foggy drive all the way to the California state line. The state line itself is a bit of a harrowing drive – lots of twisty turns through the mountains – and is especially harrowing when one can only see a few feet in front of the hood of the car. Fortunately, it was still relatively early in the day, and the road was empty, giving me lots of room to swerve about as needed. The rest of the drive was uneventful – the fog lifted in California, and I actually managed to make it through without hitting traffic at all. Highlight of the drive was hitting the northernmost In-N-Out in Redding for a grilled cheese (Animal Style), fries, and a shake. Delicious. Made it into LA around 9:30 or so, which made for a pretty pleasant day’s worth of driving.

Next couple days were fairly hectic – lots of new people at work that need brain dumps – but met up with a variety of ex coworkers Thursday night at Tia Juana’s, which is always good (both the dining with ex-coworkers and the food – I remain unable to find decent enchiladas up here). Nice leisurely dinner, and good to see people I haven’t talked to (at least not face-to-face) in a while. Friday, more work, then drove out to Sierra Madre to visit with Math. Hung out for a while, then made a late-night run to Donut Man, which makes every trip to Southern California complete.

Saturday, lunch with Math, quick trip to the comic shop, then drove up to Carpinteria to visit with the family. My sister’s been having a rough time lately, so was good to be able to get some time to talk to her. I really remember being incredibly miserable at her age (she’s 14), so it’s tough to watch someone else going through a rough adolescence. Also got to hang out and play music with my dad, which is fun and something we don’t get to do often enough.

Sunday, back in the car for a much more unpleasant drive. Northern California was getting hammered with rain and wind, so that was pretty pleasant. I was kind of poorly rested by this point and, by the time I hit the utterly terrifying Benicia-Martinez Bridge, I was pretty much convinced I had somehow ended up in one of those recurring nightmares about driving on bridges to nowhere that usually end up with my car falling endlessly into space. (You all have those dreams, right?) Anyway, once I got to Williams, the rain was about done, so the drive progressed pretty much as it should. Got in around 11 and was very very pleased to be home again.

Next up is the Jandek concert, which really deserves its own entry. And I have to post my findings from the B’s (as I’m already nearly done with the C’s). But, before I get to that, I’ve been meaning to share this cover:

Mountain Goats – The Boys Are Back In Town
It’s from a live set on VPRO from a few years ago and, while it doesn’t count as a proper discovery in my archives (as I’ve heard it several times before), the song really connected pretty solidly this time through. Now, there are a fair number of cover songs the Mountain Goats have done over the years – most of which are really good songs (The Irony Engine, Terror Song, Hellhounds on My Trail, Two Headed Boy), but aren’t particularly good covers. Aside from the fantastic cover of The Sign many many years ago, I wouldn’t pick John’s cover over the original in any of the cases.

This one, on the other hand, blows the original out of the water. Now, I’m not much of Thin Lizzie fan, so that might not be saying much, but this interpretation takes a song that I’ve always kind of ignored and turns it into something that could fit in nicely on Nebraska (and, again, I’m not a huge Springsteen fan either, but Nebraska impresses me greatly). Really, I think the entire appeal of this cover hinges on John’s pronunciation of the word “steamin’.” The song also has Peter providing some backup vocals, which always helps.

I should also point out that it turns into an R. Kelly cover about 2/3rds of the way through. An odd choice, but still doesn’t prevent the song from being fantastic.

(Events described herein occur on the weekend of April 7th)

Saturday afternoon, I remembered that my mother had sent me some online credit for Fandango. Portland’s a little light on chain theaters (especially on our side of town), which is great, but makes it hard to use Fandango credit. Since we didn’t particularly want to see anything at the mall theater, we took a train downtown and went to the Fox Towers theater to see Brick. The theater was nice – reminded me of one in Boston, the one by the Necco factory. The movie itself was kind of odd – it’s a hard-boiled noir, complete with genre-appropriate slang, set in a modern-day high school in San Clemente. Strangely, they didn’t go with the voiceover, which seems to be sort of an essential element of film noir – particularly when you are overplotting things, it helps to have a narrative voice to ease the transitions a bit. I read some interviews with the filmmaker afterwards in which he explained how nervous he was about pushing the audience too hard to accept the concept, but I think he probably would have relaxed a bit if he just watched a few episodes of Veronica Mars (which is also a hardboiled noir set in a present-day high school – complete with voiceover).

One of the more exciting bits of the movie was when the film stopped abruptly partway through the film, and the klaxons started blaring. We all evacuated the theater, then were shooed back in. The film started up 10 minutes later, but jumped 30 seconds or so, so there’s a chunk of the movie that I didn’t entirely follow. Not sure it made much difference in the long run. Still, meant we got some free vouchers, so can’t complain.

Dinner that night at the vegetarian chinese restaurant, then Sunday (after a day of driving to all the libraries in town to get listening material for my trip) decided to use our vouchers to go see V for Vendetta. Now, I like the comic fine, but I’m not as enthusiastic about it as many people are. I know people who put it at the top of their list for best graphic novel ever, but it’s probably not even on my top 20. Even in an Alan Moore-specific list, it probably doesn’t even get above #5 (Watchmen, Promethea, Miracleman, and Swamp Thing all beat it pretty handily). So, I was hoping I wouldn’t take the changes too personally. The movie takes a lot of liberties with the source material, but I was more upset by the people behind us who talked continually. By the time we got to the scene where the Voice was showering while watching himself on TV, the people behind us felt the need to exclaim, loudly, “In the shower?!?!” we’d had enough and walked out. However, we complained to the manager, so got ourselves another set of free vouchers. 1 1/2 movies for the price of none is not too shabby.

OK, I know I am now about a month behind on blogging, which I will get around to (good stuff to write about – trip to LA, some excellent shows, some interesting movies), but I wanted to remind everyone that tomorrow (May 6) is Free Comic Book Day.

Go check out the website to find a store near you, and go get a free comic or two. Maybe you’ll get lucky, and end up with a store that’s carrying the free indie titles. (I’m going to guess Meltdown will have a good selection for you West LA types) Probably can’t go wrong with the sampler from Fantagraphics or the Mr. Jean preview from Drawn & Quarterly. And The Preposterous Voyages of Ironhide Tom looks pretty good as well. If you have kids, I certainly advise you grab the Justice League Unlimited comic for them (and sit down and watch the show on Cartoon Network with them while it’s still on). And, if none of that is motivation enough, at least go get a free Simpsons-related comic. Surely that’s got to be enough to get you into a comic shop. And most of the LA ones are filled with fairly hip people who bathe regularly!