An explosion of indie music, and...well, that’s about it this month. That’s what happens when you upgrade your subscription to eMusic.com and get iTunes gift cards for Christmas.
Books
Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader – Again, very little in the way of new books this month. I spent most of the month finishing off the Bob Dylan: Performing Artist series (Volume 3 is quite long and a bit tedious) and plowing through Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down (which is way better than I thought it would be).
DVDs
Pat McGee Band: Vintage Stages Live – A pretty solid CD/DVD from a band I’ve discussed here before. They put out a live CD, General Admission, about seven years ago, but this is the first time you can watch them perform. Honestly, it’s a pretty accurate look at the band. It goes a long way in showing how they’ve managed to develop a strong foundation of fans despite a lack of radio play.
This month’s Netflix rentals:
An Inconvenient Truth
We’ve made plenty of comments about this one in the past.
A Prairie Home Companion
Going into this one, I had no idea whether I would love or hate this movie, and...well, it was pretty much directly in between those two. Companion the movie is, I figure, a lot like Companion the live performance—hokey, amusing, comforting, and unchallenging in every way. It was probably worth seeing because of the performances of Kevin Kline and Maya Rudolph (and for the disorienting effect of watching Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin and Lindsey Lohan performing together), but it’s probably not something I’ll ever need to watch again.
Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest
I have a rule: when your main motivation for watching a movie is a) action scenes and explosions, and b) attractive people, then that movie should never ever ever last more than 1 hour, 45 minutes. There’s just nothing that vital to the plot to take it over this length. Well, Pirates 2 is a relatively entertaining 1:45 movie...stretched to 2:30. Seriously, just an inexcuseable length on this movie.
Clerks 2
As with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, if you enjoy the characters Kevin Smith has created in the last 12-14 years, then you’ll enjoy the movie. Unlike with Jay and Silent Bob, though, this movie isn’t just an “Aren’t these characters funny? You know they are!” victory lap. There is a decent streak of creativity and plot (all of which is quite perverted and crude, though not all of which is believable...I mean, come on, Rosario Dawson hooking up with Dante?? Sorry if you haven’t seen it and didn’t want a spoiler, but you need as much mental preparation for that one as possible), in this one. However, just like with Jay and Bob, if you didn’t enjoy the other Kevin Smith movies, you should just let this one pass you by as well.
Music
(Can’t really call this section “CD’s” anymore since I don’t actually buy cd’s anymore)
Vintage Stages Live, Pat McGee Band
While it is nice to have a live DVD, I’m glad there’s an audio-only version of this concert in this set as well so I can listen on the iPod. Again, it’s a good representation of where PMB were musically (before the death of Chris Williams, anyway), though the inclusion of “Who Stole Her from Heaven” and the exclusion of “Hero” was a bit disappointing to me. But then, only PMB obsessives (or former PMB obsessives) would find that strange or disappointing.
The Greatest, Cat Power
Moon Pix, Cat Power
It’s relatively conventional wisdom at this point (among music nerds, anyway) that if you’re a long-time fan of Cat Power, her latest album, The Greatest, will be your least favorite as it recycles old material and incorporates a Nashville band, very much unlike her previous material; however, if you’re a Cat Power newbie, you’ll find The Greatest much more accessible and enjoyable than her more sparse-sounding earlier work. Well, I’m a Cat Power newbie, and I think The Greatest is fantastic. I found 1997’s Moon Pix a lot harder to enjoy overall. For me, the best albums are the ones that vary tempos and instrumentation, and Moon Pix is all sparse and slow. With The Greatest, the aforementioned band is involved, and even though the songs are still mostly mid-tempo or slow, there is a fantastic R&B feel to the album, and I’m liking it a lot.
Best songs (from The Greatest): “Lived in Bars,” “Living Proof,” “Love and Communication.” Best songs (from Moon Pix): “American Flag,” “You May Know Him.”
Under the Red Sky, Bob Dylan
I am slowly but surely filling in the gaps of my Dylan collection, and while reading Vol. 3 of Bob Dylan, Performing Artist, I went ahead and picked this one up. This is known as Dylan’s “songs for children” album, or something like that, but while the lyrics are definitely not his sharpest (nor were they necessarily supposed to be), I liked this album more than I thought I would, mostly because his band for this album was on fire.
There isn’t a lot of creativity in the song structures or instrumentation—most of the grooves are basically generic blues or R&B—but good grooves are good grooves, and just about every song has one. Not saying this would make my Top Ten Dylan Albums list...just that it was worth getting. I pretty much agree with the sentiment of the album’s 1990 Rolling Stone review (“Old masters sometimes pare their statements down stylistically to attain the mythic or universal – their work gets simpler, easier. Under the Red Sky, certainly, is Dylan taking it easy. Sad to say, he's taking it far too easy. It's disheartening to find the writer of "Visions of Johanna," and a hundred other cryptic, haunting songs that have inspired countless poets, coming up with titles like "Wiggle Wiggle" and "Handy Dandy."), but the music is still worth hearing. It probably helps to know that Dylan didn't stick with this lighter style, too...if I were hearing this as Dylan's latest album, I too would probably be a lot more critical. Best songs: “Wiggle Wiggle,” “Cat’s in the Well,” “Unbelivable.”
Hip Hop Is Dead, Nas
Hell Hath No Fury, Clipse
I’ve said this before, but hip hop has most certainly entered its “hair metal” stage, where primping and pimping are more important than actually saying something of value. There has always been this aspect in hip hop, just as there always has been in rock music, but it’s successfully come to the forefront now. And that doesn’t make Nas very happy. I’ve always been a relatively casual Nas fan, meaning I own most of his albums, but I honestly can’t remember too many of his songs. He’s a strong lyricist, especially when he’s taking on tough subject matter, and that makes his music worth listening to, even if he’s never really had beats that were all that great. I still have to listen to this album a few more times to get a grasp on the vocals, but I can say this for sure: these are the best beats a Nas album has ever had (“Where Are They Now,” in particular), and “Still Dreaming” with Kanye West (who I really hate liking as much as I do) and “Black Republican” with Jay-Z (“I feel like a Black Republican/Money I got comin’ in”...it’s creative, at least) are fantastic collaborations. Nothing but good songs and good beats on this one.
And I should mention that the title track samples “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”...you know, just so you’re not as taken aback as I was by that.
As for Clipse, I am so desperate to discover new good hip hop groups that I’ll pretty much take a chance on anybody who gets a lot of good press. It took four years for Clipse to put out their second album, and it’s a good one...though that is almost totally because of the productions of The Neptunes. Clipse get the first crack at these innovators’ beats, and you can tell. The beats on this album are about as good as I’ve ever heard. The lyrics are decent (the rhymes are pretty good), but not creative in the least. In other words, lots of bitches and hos and guns and the like on this one. However, the lyrics are good enough in songs like “Wamp Wamp (What It Do)” and “Chinese New Year” (“I was in and out of homes like the Orkin man”) to make those songs as good as anything else that came out in hip hop in 2006.
Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Tom Waits
I’d never really thought about checking out a Tom Waits album before, but this was generating lots of good press, and his appearance on Daily Show was quite entertaining. I had reservations, “His voice is just so damn weird” being the most prevalent, but I decided to go ahead and check it out one disc at a time on eMusic. I will say that some of the covers he chose (pop standards like “Sea of Love” and “Young at Heart”) don’t do anything for me, but every time he pins his ears back and rocks out, it works tremendously. He absolutely nails songs like “Buzz Fledderjohn” and “The Return of Jack and Judy,” and a lot has already been said about “Road to Peace”...
Young Abdel Mahdi (Shahmay) was only 18 years old...that there’s really not much I can add. This one definitely belongs in the Liked It More Than I Thought I Would category.
He was the youngest of nine children, never spent a night away from home
And his mother held his photograph, opening the New York Times
To see the killing has intensified along the road to peace
There was a tall, thin boy with a whispy moustache disguised as an orthodox Jew
On a crowded bus in Jerusalem, some had survived World War Two
And the thunderous explosion blew out windows 200 yards away
With more retribution and seventeen dead along the road to peace
A Blessing and a Curse, Drive-By Truckers
I’ve heard good things about the Truckers for a while...that they were an extremely competent mix of southern rock and jam band...things like that. I compare them to one of my more recent discoveries, My Morning Jacket. They are indeed both one part Black Crowes/Allmans, but they both like to explore new ideas. Neither of them worry about technical perfection and polish in their studio recordings, which can either lead to sloppiness or raw perfection (to me, the chance for raw perfection is worth the risk of sloppiness), and they both utilize a shaky falsetto from their singer part of the time. Overall, I think I’ll stick with MMJ, but this was worth getting for songs like “Easy On Yourself” and “Daylight.”
Live: Austin City Limits Festival, Flaming Lips
I stumbled across this 4-song set of the Lips’ performance at ACLF this year on iTunes, and it was a lovely surprise. A video download would have been better, since so much of the Lips’ performance is visual, but for the money (<$5), this was more than worth it.
I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, Yo La Tengo
All the Music Nerd magazines were raving about this a few months ago, and since I had a few more downloads to use, I decided to give in and give it a shot. Every song from this poppy, sometimes-falsetto, upbeat, nerdy group (who most certainly couldn’t beat your ass) is good, and I gave them pretty much all **** on the iPod, but when the album was over, I couldn’t think of one single, memorable song beyond the adventurous 10-minute jam (“Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind”) that kicks off the album. For the most part, this is pretty much the definition of “light and enjoyable,” but there’s enough risk-taking here to set Yo La Tengo apart from most.
As with most everything else I got this month, this was worth getting (and it falls into the ever-referenced Liked It More Than I Thought I Would category), but it still falls behind The Greatest, Hip Hop Is Dead, Vintage Stages Live, and possibly Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards on this month’s pecking order. If this came in fourth, though, it was a pretty damn good month for music. Best songs: “Beanbag Chair,” “The Room Got Heavy,” “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind.”
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