¤ jetless heights

makin’ tea in your underwear

+ Sun, March 13

15. Interpol – PDA

This past weekend me and some buds packed it up and high-tailed it down to Chicago to catch Interpol sexily swagger their way through the Aragon Theater.  Similar to last time, they played as spartan as possible.  Beyond singing, I think Paul said between two and three words to the audience.  That, in conjunction with the precision they perform with and Carlos’ gothic coroner’s jacket/Dracula suit made it very much an Interpol set through and through.

Interpol - March 12, 2005 - Chicago, Illinois - Aragon Theater

  1. Next Exit
  2. Slow Hands
  3. Narc
  4. A Time To Be So Small
  5. Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down
  6. Public Pervert
  7. Not Even Jail
  8. Hands Away
  9. Evil
  10. NYC
  11. Take You On A Cruise
  12. PDA

    Encore
  13. The Specialist
  14. Obstacle 1
  15. Roland

One of the things I like most about Interpol is the motion that each track seems to carry.  Take PDA.  The way I envision this song is as something running towards a cliff and taking flight at that ultimate moment of danger and tension.

Check out those first three minutes of flight check, building up material and laying much foundation.  Plowing through this and that, muscling its way through to that moment, 3:09 in when the ground cuts away.  Soaring free, propelled by their own weight, outward those guitars fly.  They hang aloft for a full 45 seconds before those wings of Sam Fogarino spread and pump, propelling that flight further still.  Cruising past the hazy cirrus clouds of Paul Banks’ vocals, the stage is set for a brush with the angels in the following track.

11:57 PM  ×  2 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Wed, March  9

14. Weezer - The World Has Turned And Left Me Here

Hello dear, I know it’s been a while but spring break time is simply not computer time.  However, spring break has ended and to you I return.

This past Sunday was the first surprisingly warm, sunshiny day of the year.  With the sunlight reflecting off this year’s record breaking amount of snowfall brighting all, light on white, it was very hard to not feel fantastic.

Driving to my parents’ having the windows down and Weezer’s blue album on was a perfect fit.  Rounding the corner to the exit of the student ghetto, there’s a couple stereotypically smiling, running then embracing.  What’s with these homies?

Arriving there, Chadwick the iPod went back to sleep and my original blue album disc spun up.  Cracked case, worn and weathered by many hundreds of plays, it’s just as good as it was that May day in 8th grade.  Baccus still sits there in the insert, smoking his pipe with antennae buzzing.  There’s the amp Rivers sets his juicebox down on in the Say It Ain’t So video in what’s possibly the most perfect moment in all of publicly documented Weezer history.

8th grade.  My, how long ago that was.  I had just discovered this fancy technology that was starting to catch press called “MP3”.  MacAMP was still in beta, encoding took 15 minutes per song, your best bet was still to download songs off Hotline servers.  With your 56k modem.

I was a paperboy then.  Trusty Discman in bag, out I went.  Ah, there it is.  The tambourines at the beginning of My Name Is Jonas always remind me of how yellow-green those maple leaves were against that brilliant blue sky you only see in May.  The way The World Has Turned And Left Me Here seemed to be oh so perfectly written for me and my middle school crush.  I’m not sure whatever happened to her, but I do know is that the solid, carefree-ness of those early summer days in that carefree time of early ‘99 are forever imprinted on the blue album.  Top of my 8th grade game—gigantor glasses, Yoda shirt and all.

Now, to go to my garage and play my stupid songs.

3:02 AM  ×  3 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Fri, February 25

13. Radiohead - Subterranean Homesick Alien

It was July of 1997 when I heard Radiohead’s Ok Computer for the first time.  How on earth did I, a seventh grader, nab one of the best albums ever produced the month it came out?  I really don’t know.  Ask Mark Tuttle, he told me to buy it that one day we were at the old Tower Records downtown.

I didn’t really know the band at the time so I didn’t really have too much of a drive to listen to it, honestly.  The first time I did though was quite the experience.

It was one of those dull afternoons you can have in the summer when you’re left with too much time on your hands.  No one was terribly up for doing much so, being bored, I rented a movie.  That movie, as it turned out, was 1993’s Fire In The Sky, some alien abduction “true-story” that I had wanted to see years earlier.

I remember sitting there listening to Subterranean Homesick Alien when that scene where the narrator wakes up the ship came out.  Him floating down the hall, covered in alien juice as those lofty guitars floated here and there.  His terror along with the disorientation in that song.  Lost, foreign, ethereal.  Listening to it today walking back from work, I could steal feel that organic claminess just as clearly as I could 8 years ago.

10:21 PM  ×  1 Comment  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Thu, February 24

12. Spoon - I Summon You

Spoon is a band that I really get and really don’t get all at once.  They’re easily accessible, there’s nothing ethereal happening here.  At times the songs seem simple, nothing too outlandish.  Other times, those very same songs seem impossibly intricate and infinitely detailed.  This is weird and I’m still stricken by it years after first hearing them.  I think now that it’s the product of nothing less than genuine love of the craft and an honest and open pursuit of quality.

I cheat you tonight with a song that you simply can’t get yet.  Their fifth LP doesn’t even hit the streets till May 10 and I’m going to tease you with a song from it.  I suppose, though, that it’s not too unfair as I know this song originally from the demo teasing Britt Daniel did to me last summer.

How simple this song is!  On that demo, yes, it’s lone guitar and vocal, but the music, it’s so simple!  But god, listen to this song and tell me that it doesn’t completely pervade your brain.  One day in January my housemate had just come in.  He walked past my door as this song was playing and stopped midway up the stairs to come back and hear the rest of it.  A minute later he was in his room streaming it off me.  3 minutes and 55 seconds later he had his guitar out and was practicing it.  This was caused by 2 or 3 seconds of spontaneous exposure.

What is it about this song?  It’s not bouncy pop, indeed, the subject matter is rather heavy and loaded.  It’s not loaded with varying hooks and upstage production, hell, this is a rough demo with a pretty unvarying guitar part.  It’s not even particularly well recorded!  But yet there it stands, engaging as ever.

My take?  Champion songcraft.  Brilliant devotion to the process of making music.  A crystal clear idea from a sharp mind, brought to creation by educated hands and a sensitive ear.  Examine the flushed out album version and you’ll find more evidence.  That acoustic guitar stills sits there center stage with Britt’s throaty rasp, but the song finds itself with a little more kick from a persistent drum kit and with a little more aural pleasure from a quiet, airy guitar floating through the verses.

All that and Spoon do it with no apparent effort.  Believe me when I call this an instant Spoon classic.

10:51 PM  ×  0 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

11. Weezer - El Scorcho

The first time I heard El Scorcho was in David Nestor’s car in 6th grade.  I remember hearing the “Goddamn you half-Japanese girls” line and writing whatever group that was off on the spot as some crappy, racist group or something like that.  I did this.  I did this with Weezer.  And no, I can’t believe it either.

I didn’t end up buying this album until early 1999 when I decided to, y’know, catch up with every single other one of my peers and give Weezer the good listen they deserved.  I bought the blue album and Pinkerton at roughly the same time and essentially listened to nothing but them for the next 4 or 5 months and indeed, 7 years later, I still hold them as two of the best albums I own.  Absolute classics.  Pinkerton’s been on my mind recently as I’ve finally come to terms with those that call it as an “emo” masterpiece.

And I settled on the subject how?  Simple: those people are wrong.  Those people are wrong and I hate them.

Let’s look at Pink Triangle as an example.  Nice song about a guy falling in love with a lesbian, something for him to be bummed out about for sure.  If this were an emo song the rough trajectory would go as such: boy meets girl, boy learns girl is a lesbian, boy moans for 3 minutes, boy performs acoustic solo, boy performs “edgy” electric solo, boy moans for one minute more, boy’s strained vocals fade out.  That’s that, but this, this is Weezer and after a nice sarcastic rocker, they end the song with the quaint litte “If everyone’s a little queer / Why can’t she be a little straight?”  Sarcasm topped with—oh yeah—more sarcasm.  And it’s funny!  What emo songs ends with humor?

El Scorcho itself?  Come on now, it’s a song about a girl and it’s named for a hot sauce in a New Mexico restaurant.  Emo that, record reviewer asshat.

When it comes to Pinkerton, certainly it’s an album about heartache and longing and all the other fun girl things, but get serious here.  Weezer approaches the subject with a playful, sarcastic take, poking fun at the girl, poking fun at themselves and even poking fun at their little, ol’ three chord music.  If this were truly an emo album, it wouldn’t be having fun, it would be wistful and longing.  And Rivers definitely would not let you know that he’d rather keep whackin’.

2:30 AM  ×  2 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Wed, February 23

10. Smashing Pumpkins – Set The Ray To Jerry

Sorry all, I plum forgot last night (plum!) to post a song.  So love, here you are.
 
The Pumpkins may be best known for their louder, more aggressive songs but what I enjoy them for the most are their more ruminative tracks.  Take “Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans” or “Galapogos” from Mellon Collie or “Mayonaise” off Siamese Dream, hell, even on Adore there’s an excellent example in “For Martha”.  Yeah the ’90s will remember this great band as a loud rocker band, and certainly they were, but I feel their prestige is most apparent when they took it slow and methodical.

Take “Set The Ray To Jerry” off the extended 1979 Single from the Aeroplane Flies High boxset.  Dig those pulsing drums and the low/high interplay of the guitar and xylophone.  How perfectly the calmness here goes with a snowy day.  With a secluded, independent feel and that brittle beauty of so much in winter, they go together so well.  I remember one day last winter, setting out onto North Campus as this came on the iPod how perfectly it all fit together.  Those big gobs of snowflakes you get when it’s not too cold seemed so native to the high guitar noodling you can hear towards the end of the track.

12:12 PM  ×  0 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Mon, February 21

9. Yo La Tengo – ∀

If I were to pick my “I’m stuck on a desert island and I can only have one band for the rest of my life” band, I’d pick Yo La Tengo almost immediately.  The second I’d pause would be spent handing out deep apologies to Broken Social Scene, Interpol, HUM and The Shins.

I always find myself lost for words when it comes to this band.  With a career as old as myself, there’s a lot of ground to cover and I’m frantically trying to do that as quickly as I can.  It’s been less than a year since I first ran into them and I’ve already purchased a large portion of their output in the last decade.  70 songs in without a single one that I need to skip and with many that I need to replay.

I know this isn’t exactly a song, but as you might be able to understand, it’s hard for me to pick just one.  There’s the rolling duo of Cherry Chapstick and Little Honda.  There’s the loving touches of Autumn Sweater and You Can Have It All.  The sensual Moby Octopad, the rough ‘n tumble Deeper Into Movies, the passive-aggressive Nuclear War and the guitar rock of all of Painful.

And to think, I’ve only scratched the surface in the last nine months.  You can expect to hear more of these songs as I find the words.  Yo La Tengo for president, man.

10:53 PM  ×  2 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Sun, February 20

8. Modest Mouse – Tiny Cities Made Of Ashes

Me and Modest Mouse, we go back.  In fact, I can trace our relationship back to one single point in time.  You see, it was the summer after sophomore year and I had asked Rigel for a mix, with the only qualifier being that I wanted it to get me into Modest Mouse.  I suppose now, thinking back, it wildly succeeded.

In any event, that summer, my parents and I went out west, around Seattle and Victoria Island for the most part.  In a tidy little book store in Portland I picked up 1984 for the first time and more or less devoured it in the next 3 days.

It was while reading that I more or less did nothing but listen to that tape as we drove through those mountain roads sightseeing.  It’s because of this that Tiny Cities Made Of Ashes has always reminded me of that book.  It’s a very good fit, if you ask me.  Take the background anvil clank, the frenzied chorus begging for an escape plan, the monotonous vocals, the very song name itself.  It all alternates between a lifeless and drab scene and a panicked demand for freedom.  You can’t get too much closer to 1984 than that, can you?

I ended up buying The Moon And Antarctica on that trip and honestly listened to nothing but it for the rest of it.  If you want to fall into Modest Mouse, I very much feel that that CD is the best way to do it.  Accessible, enjoyable and good – certainly a hell of a lot easier than the obtuse anger of, say, The Lonesome Crowded West.

11:30 PM  ×  1 Comment  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Sat, February 19

7. John Denver – Take Me Home, Country Roads

It’s a Friday or Saturday night.  How do I know it’s time to close the books and kick back with the boys?  John Denver’s voice (covered very thoroughly by Housemate’s) comes belting down the hallway singing “Take me home, country roads”.

I ain’t no Denver fan, but well, I will never be able to  think of anything but partying when I hear this song.

11:53 PM  ×  3 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Fri, February 18

6. The Walkmen – What’s In It For Me?

On my bus ride down from North Campus today, as the majority of people got off before I did, I heard a song I recognized coming from the driver’s seat.  The majority of busses run without music but a few drivers do regularly play something.  Some do it with the dreck that’s on the radio, others bring a stereo.  In one of the mirrors I caught a glimpse of this driver’s iPod perched up behind his head.  A cool little setup, but much cooler when the noisy passengers got off.

I caught the droning keyboards and had it placed immediately.  I scooted forward a seat to hear it better.  The next stop came and a passenger in front of me got off.  I switched to the other side and moved closer.  I never spotted the speakers, but it was there sure enough.  The Walkmen’s What’s In It For Me? playing loud and clear, the taught tension of it and all.

If this album is the escapades of a confused drunk, this song is the quick inset of that confusion.  That fleeting moment where things seem clear (faulty logic be damned) and the solution you conjure up seems hopelessly impossible.  That drunkenly low flash point of bitterness takes effect and bam: The Rat.

11:25 PM  ×  0 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Thu, February 17

5. The Libertines – What A Waster

The first time I heard this song was in my buddy Steve’s car, driving back from the local student radio station.  I had convinced him to show me the massive vault of esoteric records dating back who knows how many decades and on the way to and fro, he played me The Libertines.  I liked it all, but it was What A Waster that stuck in my head.

I didn’t run across The Libertines again for a month or two when one day, at work, a user brought a machine in complaining of frequent memory errors.  What’s the best way to stress test the memory in a possibly ornery Powerbook?  Elementary!

  1. Switch to Finder
  2. cmd-shift-A
  3. cmd-A
  4. cmd-O

For extra fun, perform the same stunt on the Utilities folder (especially when the nut has the entire OS X Server Suite installed):

  1. Switch to Finder
  2. cmd-shift-U
  3. cmd-A
  4. cmd-O

At this point, the machine will bloom up to 20+ gb of virtual memory and things will be… zippy.  No kernel panic though.  What more could I do to test?  Why—burn a CD of course!

I switched to iTunes and looked around.  Amazingly enough, this guy had good taste in music and indeed, he even had The Libertines’ Up The Bracket.  Burn it I did, and as a glorious testament to Mac OS X’s incredible memory management, it was skip free.  64 running apps including all of MS Office, a large hunk of Adobe’s CS Suite, all of the OS X server tools, all of the normal Apple apps and a slew of other stuff and this CD burned flawlessly.

11:28 PM  ×  3 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Wed, February 16

4. The Dismemberment Plan – The Ice Of Boston

For years, I’ve been cursed with falling into a band just as they break up.  The Smashing Pumpkins concert of 1999 comes to mind.  HUM, The Promise Ring, Elliot Smith.  Pavement?  Yeah, never saw them either.

Somehow though, miracle of miracles, I caught The Dismemberment Plan on their farewell tour.  What’s really amazing is how fantastically that entire show went.  Good venue, good friends, good audience, front row, a set full of song requests.  I mean, when you get to request one of your favorite songs and the bassist comes down to high five you for the choice, well, something absurd would have to happen to make that show less than stupidly wicked.

In any event, at the time I was only familiar with Emergency & I and Change.  While those are definitely the two albums to own, it didn’t help me understand why everyone cheered when someone requested The Ice Of Boston.

Now, the song was nice and all and dancing on stage and sticking one of my red DPlan stickers on a stage pillar (the front left one at the Magic Stick) was totally rad and all, but that was only one listen.  I picked up Is Terrified sometime shortly thereafter and, well… I still can’t get into it very much.  Just a little too schizophrenic, a little too constantly dynamic.

Anyway.  To the actual story!  Later that summer I ended up on a two week vacation in Boston (thus missing the one and only HUM reunion show since 2000) and sure enough, I made it a point to listen to The Ice Of Boston.

We stayed at the beautiful (and highly, highly recommended) Charles Hotel for the nights in Boston itself and it was a very nice time of year there.  Hot during the days certainly, but at night it was cool and the air was scented perfectly of summertime.  Given that this was directly downtown in a very urban area and very close to the waterfront, that says a lot for the quality of the air.  I went for a walk one night, scoping out the area around Harvard, watching the street performers do their things (and they were surprisingly excellent, honestly) with this song playing on the iPod among others.  Walking back, I stopped in the hotel’s beautiful outdoor courtyard to plough through Bill Bryson’s A Short History Of Nearly Everything and enjoy the weather.

Something about that cool Atlantic air, the calmness of that song (for that band at least) and the familiar tone Bryson always writes in—it was all very pleasant and very calming.  If only I could’ve figured out the locations that weirdo Travis Morrison had been writing from.  Next time, I guess.

11:45 PM  ×  1 Comment  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Tue, February 15

3. The Strokes – Is This It?

Remember those “very late nights”?  That’s what happens when you bite off way more than you can chew and you decide to just gnaw it out to the very, very end.

The opening of this track, with its rewind sliding into humdrum drums and the most too-hip-to-be-excited vocals brings me back to waking up on my futon at some ludicrous hour and realizing that I fell asleep in my work.  CD rewinds back, plays again and there’s that same sleepy pop song.  How a band so consistently catchy, upbeat and poppy managed to debut with such a monotonous song, well, let’s just hope this isn’t it.

3AM.  AP History study guide.  “it’s them, it’s not me”  I need to answer three more questions.  “…is this it?”  Crap, I need to finish off the last of that AP Chem study guide too.  “…is this iiiiit?”  Yes!  This is it!  Next track!  Oh wait, this one begins with 40 seconds of two guitar notes over and over, next!  Oh, to hell with it, no more music, just work, just sleep.

Nowadays I can relate with the album a little more congenially.  But that opener, that will always be tied with that blunt sense of dread at realizing I’ve been asleep.

Download Is This It off the iTMS.

11:58 PM  ×  4 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Mon, February 14

2. Broken Social Scene – Stars And Sons

Drone rock at its absolute finest.

There was a night last summer where I had gone to the movies with a few friends and this one girl I had been after for who knows how long.  For whatever optimistic reason, I thought this particular go around with her was different, and I remember on this one night I dropped her off and had You Forgot It In People playing on the iPod in the car.  Nothing of note happened with her that night, but it was all very pleasant and as I pulled down the driveway, Stars And Sons came on.

It was when that drumming and those vocals that seem to come from inside your head kicked in that everything became clear all at once.  When you turn up the volume a bit, that voice truly feels as if it’s permeating everything around you and in you.  Try it with decent headphones—they’re quiet as a whisper but simultaneously intense and penetrating.

How a song based on droning guitars can have such a lively kick and sense of motion I just don’t know.  But I’ll tell you, this song after midnight, played loudly on an empty road with black trees racing past you, you will very much feel that push and it will quite literally move you.

11:34 PM  ×  1 Comment  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Sun, February 13

A Month Of Music

Despite what it may have seemed to you over the past entire existence of this site, I do have a genuine interest in writing large amounts for you to read.  Pages and pages of interesting content, both for me to write and you to read.  I’ve thought about this quite a lot, and most of the solid ideas I’ve had have been written in full and published.  Those are scattered pieces though, and indeed, quite scattered as it’s turned out.

So here I sat tonight, listening to a song and there it was.  That sudden idea out of nowhere and it plows into you with more force than all the others.  Smashing through, the realization that I have a story for every one of my cd’s set in.  Those stories are often pages long and begin with the opening of my musical life and culminating in the footsteps I took to whatever store it was.  At the song level though, they’re short and sweet.

And so to you I give 30 days, 30 songs and 30 stories.  We begin now:

1. The Promise Ring – Best Looking Boys

Yesterday, in a conversation with a friend of mine in Florence for the semester, she said, “The kind when you’re driving in your car on Stadium and think, ‘god damn I’m happy to be alive today,’ and stick your left arm out the window and crank up your music a little bit louder.”  She was referring to something else, but the sentiment is the same and those of you from Ann Arbor can stop reading now because you already know this beyond words.

This is May, 2002.  This is driving to track practice with well-tied shoes and running shorts on, with the window down and the music up and with very late nights behind me and that weekend just before me.  This is dorks with a drum machine and a dork with dad’s Jetta.  There wasn’t a whole lot in that time I wasn’t doing and there was even less I didn’t think I could do.  This is that surging invincibility that only comes with a sunny almost summer day, a packed week and an accelerator.

Download Best Looking Boys off the iTMS.

11:51 PM  ×  4 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Fri, February  4

Kid A

The best way to listen to Kid A is walking home at 3AM on headphones when the air is cold enough to bite but not sting.  All is quiet, delicate and sparse.

It’s been a terribly taxing two weeks.  My work is complete, my projects are in and my points are made.  Here’s to relaxing weekends.

4:06 AM  ×  5 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Wed, October 20

From A Basement

Each individual bit of Elliott Smith’s posthumous final album drops like a cannonball into a still lake, bound forever to last year’s events.  Listening is an exercise in helplessly watching ripples wash ashore.

7:42 PM  ×  2 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Thu, September 16

Dirty Secrets

Jeremy at Antipixel wants to know about your iPod’s dirty little secrets.

The way I do things, my iPod only stores songs which I’ve checked in iTunes and as it turns out, my secrets remain unchecked.  While they don’t waste space on my little white friend, dirty secrets I have.

Wait.  Wait.  Hootie And The Blowfish?  What?

All I have to say for myself is that 1995 was a long time ago and I was in 5th grade.

8:10 PM  ×  5 Comments  ×  1 Trackback

+ Wed, September  8

Slow Hands

Interpol is like a dark woman, slicing effortlessly into your world, pulling you into the most unabashedly passionate stages of your life.

You make me want to pick up a guitar
and celebrate the myriad ways that I love you

Interpol – Slow Hands

4:25 PM  ×  2 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Fri, July 23

Music Stats

There are a number of things which tickle my fancy in very consistent ways.  Two of them are music and statistics.  Together, they form sort of a super-fancy-tickler-from-space or something.  There’s a handy little app that’ll pull your play counts data from iTunes and do some light processing of that (sorry, Mac only).  Let’s look at my data.

Songs: 4,159 songs
Listens: 37,711 listens
Duration: 98.6 days
Average: 9.1 listens/song
Favorite: 4-way tie; 30 listens each

Those four, by the way, are Weezer’s Tired Of Sex, The Dismemberment Plan’s Spider In The Snow and two from The Shins, Kissing The Lipless and their brilliant Young Pilgrims.

Numbers are cool, but what do they mean?  My play counts got reset when I got my G5 on October 6.  There were 291 days between October 6, 2003 and July 23, 2004.  Out of those 291 days, I’ve been awake for roughly 145 of them and of that five month timeframe, 68% of it has been spent listening to music.  That’s a lot of time spent listening to music.  Reminds me of that quote in High Fidelity:

What came first, the music or the misery?  People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over.  Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss.  Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable?  Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

I don’t mean to allude to being a sad bastard and wallowing in my own depressing music filth, a quick gander through my recent music would directly disprove that hypothesis.  No, rather that quote bubbles to the surface on account of the subject at hand.  You always have to wonder what’s the cause and what’s the effect or whether it’s a self-compounding system.  Do you choose your music to be a soundtrack for your life or do you bend your life around the music you listen to?

Personally, I choose the self-compounding system answer where the effect causes the cause which causes the effect.

1:25 AM  ×  16 Comments  ×  2 Trackbacks