Thursday, July 8, 2010

Egan & Napster Reunited

Dog days of summer. It's like 134 degrees outside and my IPod shuffle broke, eliminating my ability to provide a soundtrack for everything I do...and therefore my basic functionality. I need some new damn music. Unfortunately: money's tight; none of my record stores (or the music library) seem to have anything on my "wish list" [see right]; I'm tired of nickel-and-diming myself on MP3s that don't...in the words of P. Diddy, "preserve the sexy" of my music collection; and ITunes killed Lala.

What's a music lover to do?

I never thought I'd say this, but it's time to consider a subscription music service.

In some twisted proof that we don't have control over our own destiny, I've essentially become the target audience for these enterprises. My summer job keeps me tethered to a computer all day, so hooking up the headphones is a plus. And, as I proved to myself with Lala, when given access to a massive library of music I basically go insane like Augustus Gloop in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Room.

Of course, with Lala--a free service--the catch was that you could only listen to any song or album once while deciding to download. With the paysites, you pay a monthly fee and have the right to download, along with unlimited streaming (assuming it's available). Turns out the prices are pretty reasonable. Rhapsody, the first site I checked out, costs $10 a month; Napster--that's right, Napster--is cheaper, based on different "tiers" of commitment.

It really wasn't a hard sell for me to go with Napster. I was in undergrad during Napster's glory days, when you could download virtually anything in about 5 seconds. In retrospect it makes no sense that this was possible, but it caught the music industry so off guard that by the time they were able to control it, people had come to view free access to music as a right. Kind of like when people started having sex for fun instead of just for procreation in the late 1960s.

Anyways, the death of the original Napster always saddened me, so after checking out the service and being convinced that the subscription version's got the biggest library, I decided to blow $15 for a 3-month subscription. So far, I'm pleased. The web interface is solid, and the one for Google Chrome is retro 2002-style, which of course pleases me to no end. If anyone out there is like me, and slaves away at a desk, pissing away valuable minutes to Pandora's bogus music genome robot, I would highly recommend checking out the new Napster.

We'll have to see whether my work computer, which struggles to automatically update GMail, can ultimately handle the sweetness, but I'm already a happier man, now that I've got thousands of new tunes at my disposal.

Now it's time to dive in:


First listens today were Miles Kurosky's (Buelah) awesome 2009 solo album, The Desert of Shallow Effects, and a little Outkast Stankonia...just cuz I needed some.


Monday, June 7, 2010

Bullets


  • Summer albums column on the way soon, I promise; along with some more Rock Doc Summer reflections.
  • R.I.P. lala.com -- if you were a lala user, you know what a loss it was when Apple shut it down on May 31. Basically, as a subscriber you could listen to any album or song once for free, then you had several options of buying--as a web album for when you're on the 'net, regular mp3, album download, etc. The prices were all below ITunes, as well. It also had way more functionality as a social networking platform for music, with user-generated playlists and recommendations/reviews. I think I listened to about 100 new albums on there, and it made me a more active buyer...call me crazy, but I think it looked a little bit like a happy future for online music. But, since the future is already owned and branded by Apple, they snatched it up, halfheartedly tinkered with it and then shut it down. Bollocks.
  • Highly recommend checking out the new Ratatat album, LP4, available for free listenin' at NPR. Electro-rock is really not my thing, and my previous exposure to Ratatat was confined to video games (true, really), but the production and vibe on this album is really engaging. Dig.
That's all for now, stay tuned for more coherent thoughts.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Summer Babes (not like that)

As I mentioned in a tweet last week, I'm currently assembling a list of my top-5 summer albums for a column [a follow up to my 2009 piece on Egan's top-5 spring albums, where I explained my premise that all good albums should pair with seasons, much like wine with food]. If you know me, it goes without saying that Pavement makes this list...but which record? My first thought was Slanted and Enchanted, given the anthemic weight of the first track, "Summer Babe (Winter Version)," along with its general sense of careless artistic expression.

But what about Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain? My favorite album, it bears mentioning, but also the most angsty in Pavement's catalog. "Gold Soundz" is summer love ("so drunk in the August sun/ and you're the kind of girl I like/ because you're empty, and I'm empty/ and you can never quarantine the past)" and the epic "Range Life" is guiltless summer apathy: hopping turnstyles, riding aimlessly on skateboards, sniping at the Smashing Pumpkins..."school's out/what did you expect?!"

But wait! Then I gave Wowee Zowee a fresh listen, and I'll be damned if I didn't come away thinking that the album's sprawling ebb and flow made it Pavement's most dynamic document. There's blistering heat on there ("Rattled by the Rush") and sad, rainy days (the alt-countryesque "Motion Suggests" and "Father to a Sister of a Thought")...and isn't that what summer is all about?

Sure...but then there's Brighten the Corners, widely considered Pavement's attempt to find musical maturity rooted in a more classic rock sound. Tell me that "Shady Lane" isn't about innocent summer romance. I mean, who has oysters and dry lancers in Winter? And Terror Twilight? You mean the album that basically defined my first summer in Boston, 1999?

You see where I'm going with this. I've basically come to the conclusion that Pavement is a summer band. To see if my wistfulness had carried me too far, I decided to test my hunch by looking at recording and release dates for each of their major albums:

Slanted and Enchanted: Recorded Dec-Jan 90-91/ Released Apr 91
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain:......Aug-Sept 93/ February 94
Wowee Zowee:...................................Nov 94/April 95
Brighten the Corners:............................Jul 96/ Feb 97
Terror Twilight.....................................Jun-Dec 98/Jun 99

Three out of five ain't bad. Even if the evidence isn't conclusive, I swear there's something there. Maybe it has something to do with that too-cool-to-care Northern CA identity. It just seems fitting that Pavement got back together after a ten year hiatus this summer...right?*

None of this, of course, helps me with my decision. Which of these albums best embodies the summer essence? I'd be interested to hear some thoughts. I think I've made up my mind, but you'll have to stay tuned to see which album best fits my summer bill.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Rock Doc Summer: The Clash, Westway to the World

One of my several musical tonics for an idle summer in Charlottesville is the "Rock Doc Summer" project. On a regular basis, I'll be raiding the UVA library's healthy collection of music documentaries and, when so provoked, posting my thoughts on Silver Soundz. I call it a "project" because I've learned better than to make these things into commitments.

Last night I took on Westway to the World, Don Letts' 2000 documentary on The Clash. Unlike the Townes Van Zandt doc that I watched last week--and am still digesting--this film won't blow you away. Most of the footage is canned material from the band's personal collection, interspersed with snippets from one session's worth of interviews. I suspect you won't discover anything groundbreaking that you didn't already know about the Clash, nor will you come away thinking that the group is some forgotten artistic force in the pantheon of 20th century music.


That being said, if you dig the Clash, Westway will give you a much deeper appreciation for the sound and fury that comprised their "moment" from the late 70's until their breakup in 1983.

Part way through the documentary, Clash manager Bernie Rhodes is describing his attraction to the band's sound, and uses a word that resonates through the rest of the documentary: "Vital." It's dead on. Above everything else, the Clash had a tremendous amount of life. You see it in the concert footage, where--whether the crowd is in a frenzy or not--the center of gravity is always on the stage. This was helped, as bassist Paul Simonon points out, by the fact that none of them knew how to play their instruments very well. Half the fun of being in a band was the opportunity to jump around on stage, and they took advantage. Even in their swan song, as the band was deteriorating during a bruising residency New York in 1982, their music and their presence is so full of sneer and swagger. It's intimidating and inspiring at the same time.

But sure, I thought to myself, that's the punk trope: 4 guys with no money and no skills realize that you can move a crowd by wailing on your instruments, spitting into the crowd, and cursing the man. So what?

There's a few things beyond that going on with the Clash, though, and even though they take credit for none of it (that wouldn't be very punk of them, after all), the evidence is all on display Westway. First of all is ambition. Without sacrificing their credibility as a "ga-rage band," from the moment the Clash began gaining momentum with Joe Strummer's addition in 1977, they had direction. You can hear it in the way Strummer talks about their record deal, which unexpectedly put them on the hook for 10 albums. Rather than hand-wringing over the question of selling out, Strummer and Simonon immediately looked beyond England to figure out how they were going to use the opportunity to "go global."

None of this is to dispute the Clash's very serious, radical socialist politics. However, not many punk bands would cop to such pretension, and it's indicative of a second aspect to the Clash that went deeper than their "Stalinist" identity: musicality. Don't get me wrong, the Clash were just as technically bad as advertised when they formed, and their contributions did not exactly move musicianship forward to some glorious aesthete. But what the Clash excelled at was creating a definitive sound, which is all the more impressive given their individual musical handicaps. Mick Jones, who learned guitar by playing along with punk and reggae records in his room, ends up being the master arranger for the band, according to Joe Strummer. Paul Simonon, who joined the band with the express purpose of acting like Pete Townshend on stage, says he forced himself to write "Guns of Brixton" because he realized that you didn't make money in a band unless you could write. Finally, it's impossible to ignore Joe Strummer's own emphasis on the drumming of Topper Headon, who was so technically skilled that he allowed the band to explore different forms of music at will. That's where Strummer (and Jones) come in--synthesizing 1970's West Indian Reggae with blue collar British Punk; fat-chord American punk a la the Ramones with emerging hip hop--writing and arranging songs that sound like nothing really before or since.

The documentary also gives due credit to Guy Stevens, who produced the Clash masterpiece London Calling. As any good producer must do, he succeeded in eliciting and amplifying the band's emotions and personalities in the studio. The result is undeniably good--London Calling is, for me anyway, the White album of punk rock. So many styles, so much range, and the band's confidence (skill or no skill) bleeds through every song from the title track to the punk-ballad standard "Train in Vain." Strummer admits that the album represents the band's "finest hour." Their rise from a group of derelicts to really (for lack of a better word) professional musicians by 1979 is stunning.

It's equally jarring, then, to see the group fall apart by 1983. The documentary recounts all the reasons--overtouring, drug addiction, internecine hatred [Jones and Simonon would only communicate through Strummer]--but the end was somewhat anticlimactic. After a bitter show in 1983, the band simply made a decision to call it quits. A few of the members wonder on camera how things might have played out if they stayed together, but the implicit answer is that it doesn't matter. The Clash embodied the dilemma at the heart of the term "punk rock": they pulled themselves up from nothing, proving that the D.I.Y. punk ethic didn't have to limit a band, but could actually shape the development of something musically ambitious. Their rock n' roll was vital, but ultimately it was about just living for a moment. When challenged, the moment fell apart, and so did the band.

They left it all on stage. And what's more punk rock than that?

**Note: Much of the documentary is on youtube, but rather than give the links to a pirated version (of which I'm sure the Clash would approve), I've embedded some links to relevant clips.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Just Because: Badass Live Videos

Resurfacing after months of silence; the slog of the school semester is over, and I'm feeling free. Thoughts on summer music coming soon, but for now, some badass live performances. Just because.

Pearl Jam- Animal (Indio, CA-1993)

Led Zeppelin- Immigrant Song (1972)

AC/DC- Shot Down in Flames (??)

Monday, January 25, 2010

Free Dios Leaks from Buddyhead


One of my favorite under-the-radar groups, Dios (previously/alternately known as Dios Malos) is due to release their third album "We are Dios" in early February on West Coast record label/rock n roll tastemaker Buddyhead. At the end of 2009 they dropped a 4th quarter single, "Puttin it Down" via free download. Very solid stuff. This week they've given us one more appetizer; the 2010 1st quarter single, "Feather in Yr Cap," also free. I'm about to check it out, and you should follow my lead. Songs, some cool artwork, and some news on the upcoming release from Buddyhead--links below:

Friday, January 22, 2010

Resolution Rock

Mea Culpa: I suck.

6 months ago, I moved from Washington, DC to Charlottesville, VA. At the time, I expressed optimism that the change of music scenery would invigorate my writing and jumpstart this blog. That was not the case.

In fact, the life change proved fairly overwhelming and, despite my best intentions, I completely dropped off the map. I know how devastating this was to my loyal readership. I feel like a bad parent. Not, like, Leland Palmer-bad, but my trail of broken promises is a major let-down to the great ideas that inspired me to start this project.

And yet, we rock on. It's a (relatively) new year still, and in 2010 my resolution is to pick up right where I left off and bring it all back home. No more hand-wringing, no more apologies, no playing catch-up. Just a clean slate and Egan Caufield going full tweed ahead.

My informal sabbatical might not have been the worst thing in the world. I have been catching up on some old music that I've unjustly ignored, including Sunny Day Real Estate and Wilco's back catalog. Now that I'm a bit more settled in, I should have more regular time to write, not to mention a massive backlog of ideas on how to make the blog cooler for you guys. Shorter pieces, more C-Ville scene stuff, more links to good/new/unheard music, and maybe even a constructive use of the Twitter medium. Believe Dat!!!

Skeptical? I don't blame you. But the proof, they say, is in the pudding. So, stay tuned to this space for a solid helping of music...pudding.

Dig!