Out of Sight

Jack Foley: It’s like seeing someone for the first time… like you could be passing on the street, and you look at each other and for a few seconds… there’s this kind of a recognition… like you both know something. The next moment, the person’s gone, and it’s too late to do anything about it. And you always remember it, because it was there, and you let it go, and you think to yourself, “What if I had stopped? If I had said something?”

“What if, what if?” And it may only happen a few times in your life.

Or once.

Karen Sisco: Or once.

Add comment January 22nd, 2012

Theme Mix Saturday – To All The Girls

It’s Sunday, I know, but I got a late start on this one.

This list started out with a much different idea in mind. To my mind, there were a lot of songs about “the different kinds of people that there are” and I set out to look for those songs. But I started with “girls” and– well, it comes as no surprise that there are a lot of songs about girls.

I then looked at similar songs with “boys” in the title, and there were approximately five. So I decided to go full throttle with a “girls” playlist; there are more than enough great songs to warrant it. As I’m writing this, I’m listening to Vetiver’s “Red Lantern Girls” for the first time in a long time and, wow, it’s a really good and dynamic song starting with an atmospheric build that really draws you in. Good stuff. So now I just have to figure out how to winnow this list down, here we go…

Jolie Holland’s “All Those Girls” fits the theme a little loosely, I’ll admit, but it’s been a favorite of mine lately, so we’ll use it and the Idris Muhammed-sampling “Paul’s Boutique” intro to introduce the theme.

“West End Girls” has to go on here because the chorus has been stuck in my head the entire time I’ve been putting this together. I’m not a huge fan of the song but I’m going with this and “California Girls” under the “obvious choice” category and eschewing “Fat Bottomed Girls” instead. So it goes at the end of the list as a novelty.

The semi-live video for LCD Soundsystem’s “Drunk Girls” is a fairly insane and pretty funny video, too.

Add comment January 8th, 2012

Disappointer…

…is the moniker that I’ve used for a long time for the songs I write, which is how it ended up being my XBox Live tag (see sidebar) among other things, but it started as my “band” name. It’s nice and sardonic and seems to have gone mostly unused, a rare thing for even an invented word in the internet age.

I’ve posted a couple of songs here before but I’ve decided to make the leap and do a bit more with it all. No one becomes a world famous writer/musician/software developer/neurosurgeon/rock star without a little bit of self-promotion unless they’re Buckaroo Banzai, and there’s only one Buckaroo Banzai.

So I’ve been working a bit more on polishing up my erstwhile songs as much as my rough-hewn aesthetic will allow, writing some new ones as always, and generally just trying to make things somewhat presentable. It’s all anyone can do.

To that end, I finally kicked off a site over at the fantastically awesome bandcamp. Ta da:

http://disappointer.bandcamp.com/

Add comment January 7th, 2012

Windows Gripes, one in a neverending series

Never mind the fact that I hate having to search for the “show file extensions” option in every new install of Windows, or the fact that the location of this particular dialog seems to change with each new iteration of the venerable Microsoft OS. There’s something else maddening about this dialog:

It’s the subtle inconsistency.

Perhaps it’s just me, but it seems contradictory that you have a host of checkboxes but the purpose of some is to show some things when checked and, for others, seemingly at random, will hide other things when checked. If it were related to their default states, one could very possibly make an incredibly weak case for their status quo, but as it is? Baffling.

It’s a small thing, but if Jobs’ legacy has taught us anything, it’s that attention to detail makes all the difference. Make “checked boxes” mean “show things” and unchecked boxes are implicitly “hide things”; or vice versa, I don’t care. But why couldn’t they just be consistent?

Add comment January 6th, 2012

Top Ten Albums, 2011 – Part V, 2-1

2. tUnE-YaRdS – w h o k i l l

Buckle up ‘cuz we’re gonna go quick, shake-a-shake-shake-a, gonna make-a you sick. – “Killa”

It’s been fun watching Merrill Garbus’ rise over the last two years. In that time, she’s gone from playing the Holocene with a lone bass player beside her; to Mississippi Studios; to the Doug Fir with a more robust backing band, saxophones and all; and, most recently, this winter at an absolutely packed Wonder Ballroom performance, which is impressive on any night, but I think this was on a Tuesday. Her live show is inspired, the woman herself inspiring. And although I had heard a lot of the songs on this list before the record came out, they’re all so good that it was inevitably going to be high on my list.

What w h o k i l l loses in the lo-fi charm and infinite-time-to-create of “bird-brains”, the songs and her style do not suffer for having the fuller production or the larger band. I tend to favor the lo-fi aesthetic and its DIY honesty in general. I like the reflections of humanity to be found in the imperfections of the music. On the other hand, tUnE-YaRdS is a force of nature, and the tools are only a means to an end. Here we’re shown that the songs that are just as potent whether cobbled together with the sounds from literal pots and pans or backed by a full horn section.

And this video for “Bizness” is pretty good, too.

1. Wild Flag

If you’re gonna be a restless soul then you’re gonna be so, so tired. – “Future Crimes”

Janet Weiss makes her second appearance on the top of my list, slaying the drum kit and singing backup for the fun and wonderful amalgam that is Wild Flag, joined by her ex-Sleater-Kinney bandmate Carrie Brownstein; Mary Timony of Helium fame; and Rebecca Cole of The Minders, Hungry Holler, and the Shadow Mortons (with Weiss). So by the line-up alone, this was a record I had highly anticipated. The Record Store Day 7″ (“Glass Tambourine” and “Future Crimes”, both re-recorded for the album proper) only heightened that. My expectations were exceeded, as not only are there are ton of other great songs on this record, but even the re-recorded ones sound better, beating out the primacy effect for once.

It doesn’t hurt that it starts and ends with end-to-end rock, and that the opener “Romance” makes for incredibly catchy radio music. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that it sounds a bit like Sleater-Kinney, because they were a fantastic band. But perhaps the biggest thing for me is all of the little moments: hooks, guitar solos, “yeahs”, lyrics, “na na na”s, driving organs and drums. They add up to a whole lot of fun that’s greater than the sum of, in the hands of a lesser band, straightforward parts. It’s the infectious shaky enthusiasm in the way Brownstein sings “if you need help with your motor / well you can borrow mine / borrow mine” in “Boom”. The quiet whispering that builds to a frenzy in the middle of “Glass Tambourine”; the pounding rhythm and the entire opening, really, of “Electric Band”; the dual guitars interplay throughout “Black Tiles”.

In record form, the tracks are divided fairly perfectly. “Short Version”, which starts the B-side, is every bit of a good album opener as “Romance”— punchy and fierce. In fact, it’s the song that ends the A-side, “Endless Talk”, that is the only track out of ten that, while I don’t think it’s bad, it’s just… forgettable, and suffers in the context of a lot of other amazing rock tunes. But it makes “Short Version” stand out even more and maybe it’s all part of the plan.

Electric Band

Add comment December 30th, 2011