Coldplay Strikes Again

Ugh. I just tried to watch the Coldplay video and the music was so boring that I couldn't get past the two minute mark. The video was something about an elephant. Coldplay kills me because I really do like enough of their songs that I am interested in their new albums, but I never completely embrace an album. The best is Rush of Blood to the Head, but the others aren't uneven per se, just alternately great and sleepy.

I don't like Ezras

Maybe I'm just biased against Ezras, but I don't like that Ezra Furman fellow. He seems like he wants to be Bob Dylan, but his bandmates wish he was someone just a little more funky. And I agree with them. I also don't like Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend nor do I like Ezra Klein, the Washington Post blogger who is my age and thinks he knows everything about social policy. All Ezras I have been exposed to in the media are pretentious hipster types. There's a horrible pun of some sort lurking in here that has to do with Better Than Ezra but I don't think it should be exposed. If I was a headline editor, I'd work it in into the title of the post. (Why does every headline on ESPN or Sports Illustrated have to be some kind of wordplay/pun? I think every article in the most recent SI suffered that fate. The authors must be grinding their teeth as their strong stories are given headlines like Deja Brew.)

B+S

"Why is this happening to you, you're not child." The song of champions...champion men.

I just downloaded Arab Strap. People seem to like If You're Feeling Sinister better.

I Wish I Was This Guy

REM

REM breaking up after 30 years feels to me like an old couple getting a divorce. Aftergoing through all the hard parts (Bill leaving the band, making albums without being in the studio together, not really talking to each other during the Around the Sun era), they suddenly get all chummy and happy again over the last three years. And now they break up? Why didn't you just split up after Reveal and spare us the last three albums? Now the kids are grown up and out of the house...BOOM! Your father and I are splitting up even though these last few years without you in the house are the best we've ever had. No, we will not be getting together with the family for festival season. In the winter of our lives, we will start new families across the country from each other, but we hope you still love us because we love you and we still love each other. A strange currency indeed.

I wore an REM hat every day junior year. Every five days I coupled it with my New Adventures in HiFi shirt. By the end of the year the shirt had pit stains and the black hat turned brown from the sun and dirt. I woke up for a month to How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us.

It was through REM that I learned about bands selling out from Jake Robertson. Apparently, they sold out when they signed with Warner Brothers before I even knew they existed. I had a hard time accepting that as it was all in the past for me and Green was my first REM album. I still don't understand how anyone can consider Green in its entirety as a sellout album. I can see maybe Stand as a sellout song and later Shiny Happy People.

I've never loved Out of Time. I don't know if I ever really loved an entire REM album front to back like I have a Radiohead or U2 album. No, that's no true, I loved Green fiercely. Even Automatic, I couldn't take Everybody Hurts and Man on the Moon soon bored me. But while their albums may have not been perfect, each album had perfect moments which is why I always returned to them. And they were usually just album tracks that killed me. Leave, Be Mine, Country Feedback, Sweetness Follows, Low, etc.

They always felt like a band that lived a double life. No ever played any of their early stuff in the radio like they did with U2 so when Eric Jacobson bought all of their early albums and played them for me, it rattled my bones. I was so used to the well-produced albums that I didn't know what to think. I felt old listening to Fables, like I was growing mold or moss on me as I listened. And that's why I love Fables more than any album save Green.

R.E.M.

I guess this day was destined to come, but, honestly, I'd never thought about it. For that reason, I was sincerely shocked to read the announcement that REM is over. After the initial shock wore off after seven or eight seconds, my next thought was, "I guess it's time." My next thought was, "I'm glad they put out Collapse Into Now as their last album." I enjoy that album, as a whole, more than anything else they put out over the last 15 years. I honestly like every song on the album. They're not all great, but I like them all. "Me, Marlon Brandon, Marlon Brando and I" is a great song that rings through my mind on a regular basis. And the closer, "Blue," while not 100% unique from their 1990's work, is pretty awesome.

I love and hate REM. They're hands down the most boring band I listen to. But they're also one of the most thrilling. I fully recognize that a lot of that thrill is nostalgic, but that's fine. The cliche rings true: they're the band I grew up with. I saw them live twice. Not many, but ok for living in Idaho/Utah. At the last concert of theirs I went to, I really appreciated how they seem to have given themselves over to their fans these last few years by saying things like, "This song belongs to you..." and then launching into "The One I Love" or "Losing My Religion." It was a stark comparison to the first time I saw them. Someone yelled, "Play 'Stand'!" and Stipe said, "We're not a jukebox." I would've liked to have seen them play "Swan Swan H" and "Find the River" live at some time in my life. "Beachball" is their worst song ever; one of the worst songs ever recorded by an American band.

Some Thoughts: An REM Retrospective From the Life of Joshua L. Sorensen, MLIS.

I never really loved Automatic like everyone else did/does. Granted there are some awesome songs there. But, as a whole, it's boring. In fact, the strongest feeling I got from Automatic came from seeing a poster of REM during the Automatic era hanging on the bedroom wall of a girl name Amber that I had a huge crush on. I thought, "Hey, I can love this album if it helps me get this girl." Of course, I never loved the album and I never got the girl.

Holy crap, "Beachball" sucks.

"Electrolite" is the far and away the one song my wife and I have listened to the most in our 14 years of being together. Far and away.

"What's the Frequency Kenneth?" is totally freakin awesome.

I once sat on the curb outside of a movie theater with a really pretty girl and told her, "When I hear 'Strange Currencies' it reminds me of you." It still reminds me of her, of course. After that incident, how could it not?

Like any true REM fan, I once had all the lyrics to "It's the End of the World..." memorized.

Whenever the song "Fretless" came on when my friends and I were hanging out I'd yell out the lyric, "She comes easy!" and it'd always get a laugh. Seriously, it'd always kill.

My t-shirt from the Monster tour--the green shirt with the black star on the front--was the only real world shirt I took with me on my mission. I vowed to wear it every single P day. I made it one year.

The one cover I have always wanted to hear from REM is U2's "Van Diemen's Land." I've always thought Stipe's voice would be perfect for singing, "A day will come in this dawning age when an honest man sees an honest wage."

While I think Reveal is their worst album, the song "I've Been High" is one of my favorite REM songs ever. In fact, when that album came out, that song sent me into a two week study of every REM album. That study lead me to the conclusion that the song "I've Been High" was the culmination of REM's entire career. I don't even know what that means. Upon coming to that conclusion, I proceeded to write REM a five page letter about it. I sent REM a hand written, five page letter explaining my theory about how the song "I've Been High" was the culmination of their career.

I played and sang "Let Me In" on an acoustic guitar for some close friends right after my mission. It was, perhaps, the last time I was cool. The "Strange Currencies" girl referenced above was in attendance.

I once listened to "Undertow" over and over on my car stereo while I changed a flat tire out in the freezing cold in Ephraim, Utah in January 2000.

I used to think the starting line of "The Wake-up Bomb" was "I look good in glasses," instead of "I look good in a glass pack." For six or seven years I'd sing, "I look good in glasses," every night when I took my contacts out and put my glasses on. When I found out what the real lyric was, I felt foolish.

During 7th grade I wrote out the lyrics of "Stand" from memory in math class, instead of paying attention to what problems my teacher was doing on the overhead projector.

The first tapes I ever bought, I got all at the same time one Saturday afternoon at the mall in Dallas, Texas. They were REM Green, U2 The Joshua Tree and...Bon Jovi Slippery When Wet. I still have the Green and Joshua tapes.

I wrote, "It's time I had some time alone" in giant letters on my bedroom wall when I was 17. How little I knew then.

This one makes me laugh now, but I once cried--literally shed tears--during "Half a World Away." I'd just left my girlfriend's house the night before I left on my mission. Though I loved her deeply, the tears weren't for her. Luckily, I can listen to that song today and not think of that incident.

My favorite REM song is "Country Feedback." When I saw REM in SLC in 1995, Stipe said, "This is Bill's and my favorite song" and then they played "Country Feedback" with the video from "Nightswimming" showing above and behind them. It totally lit me up. I thought, "My favorite REM song is Bill Berry's and Michael Stipe's favorite REM song. I totally get REM."

The 17 REM Songs That Made the Biggest Impact On My Life (In No Particular Order)

1. Nightswimming

2. Find the River

3. Exhuming McCarthy

4. It's the End of the World

5. King of Birds

6. Stand

7. Orange Crush

8. Swan Swan H

9. Superman

10. What's the Frequency, Kenneth?

11. Strange Currencies

12. Country Feedback

13. Belong

14. Low

15. Let Me In

16. Electrolite

17. Half a World Away

2 4 B+S

1. Listened to "Dirty Dream Number Two" again tonight. Went to YouTube and watched some live performances. It really changed my perception of them. Pretty cool, actually.

2. I absolutely cannot believe that "Dress Up In You" is not only NOT in the Top 10 B+S downloads on iTunes, it's not in the Top 20, 30, 40 or even 50. Kids, seriously, this is a phenomenal and a beautiful song. When I listen to it, I think, "Effortless." They make is sound so easy.

Great Lyric:

"Well it's high time we step outside

Drop the gloves and settle this like a man
Well we might stall and hem and haw
We might not fight but we won't walk away
No, we won't walk away."

Menomena, "Rotten Hell"

Is The Best Song of 2005...

The National's "Daughters of the Soho Riots"?


I think it may be.

D.F.R.o.t.M.C.D.

Revisiting Doug's Friend's Run of the Mill CD. Some thoughts:

1. This collection changed my music life. I remember listening to it over and over thinking, "How is this possible? How have I missed this music all my life?"

2. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Radiohead's "Gagging Order" is frighteningly brilliant.

3. I love Okkervil River.

4. Sparklehorse's "Gold Days" is the soundtrack to every dream I've ever had and every dream I ever will have--from the terrifying to the sexy.

5. If Will Oldham can do it, I can do it.

6. Low: Almost thou persuadest me to love slow-core. "No more airplanes."

7. Two thoughts from "Los Angeles I'm Yours": 1) Colin Meloy=pervert ("I can see your undies..."), and 2) worst...harmonica...solo...ever. EVER. It makes me feel like I'm getting hit on by some guy named Bliss in the back of some side-street barber shop called Whisper Cuts in 1983; what I was doing there in the first place I'll never know.

8. "The Best of Jill Hives" is the best of GBV I've heard. I totally would've put this song on a mix tape for (name omitted for privacy) in the spring of 1995. It would've been even COOLER if her name would've been Jill.

Two Quick Notes

1. The King is Dead Update: "January Hymn" is really killing me right now...in a good way. I'm totally in love with this song. I just listened to it 19 times in a row on repeat. "Maybe it will all come back to me," is the best line. What is it about the question of coming back? How can humanity be tied so ubiquitously to the concept of return?

2. Anyone out there remember Nirvana? I listened to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" today for the first time in maybe five years. Epic. Freakin epic. I wanted to round up my daughters and mosh. Nevermind kills.

The Decemberists: The King is Dead...and I wish I was, too, when I listen to this album (man, that's lame).

Here’s how I see it going down:

The Decemberists are driving in a van somewhere in Missouri when the engine throws a rod. The band members walk to the nearest establishment—Randy’s Roadhouse—to use the telephone to call a tow truck (because none of their cell phones are charged, obviously). While they wait for the truck, they throw a few back. And then a few more. And then a few more. And then someone puts a Willie Nelson song on the jukebox. In a drunken slur Colin Meloy yells, “What’s so special about this guy? He’s no better than me. I can do that!”

And so it began.

The King is Dead is a painful experiment by the most popular anglophiles in America. It makes me wonder: At some point in our lives do we all rear our heads and attack our starting places like the snake eating its tail? I’ll never know why The Decemberists took this turn; frankly, I don’t care. I’ve never liked more than two or three of their songs; one—“Red Right Ankle”—if I’m being completely straight. And the thing that kills me is, there’s not much difference between “Red Right Ankle” and these songs. However, I think if they’d stuck to their MO and done their thing they could’ve slipped some (two) of these songs on their albums and they would’ve been amazing. But, all together they suck. It’s like, you think it’d be so awesome to have a box of doughnuts for dinner. But, you do and instead it makes you sick to your stomach and hate the doughnuts. If you just had spaghetti and salad and then had one doughnut, your dining experience would’ve been awesome.

The Songs:

“Don’t Carry it All.” Best song on the album, I guess.

“Calamity Song.” Let’s say someone sat your best friend down on a chair across the table from you and said, “You can have this (pointing to your best friend)…OR (and they get this gimmicky smile on their face)…you can have this…” and they set down some other guy who's dressed in similar clothes as your friend, and kind of looks like him, but is a total stranger. Which would you chose? Your best friend. Every freakin time. Not the look-alike stranger. I mean, he’s your best friend and he’s sitting right there!

“Rise To Me.” Last summer I visited a friend in Colorado. He and his wife took us to this dinner-and-a-show place set on a ranch. We had bad steak and listened to four guys play country western music for an hour. As individuals they weren’t bad musicians. But the songs were utterly forgettable. And the whole time I was thinking, “This is so sad. These guys need to get real jobs.” That’s how I feel about this song. Utterly forgettable.

“Rox in the Box.” Meloy channels Linda Ronstadt circa 1975. Worst song on the album.

“January Hymn.” I started out hating this song; it was just one of the doughnuts in the “box of doughnuts for dinner” scenario. But, it’s better now.

“Down By the Water.” This sounds like an outtake from their first album. Even though I’ve never heard their first album, nor do I know the title.

“All Arise!” I want to burn this song down. More dinner theater. Very bad dinner theater. Sounds like Kenny Rogers on a bender. And I hate that stupid violin.

“June Hymn.” This one is like a photograph I stumble across from my high school days. It reminds me of my Simon & Garfunkel period. Naïve, wide-eyed, trying-so-hard-to-be-poetic. I like the chorus up until, “panoply” then it just collapses under the weight of its own pretension.

“This is Why.” This song is the theme song for the new CW television series based on Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The part (at 3:46 in the track) where he sings “So come to me…come to me now. Lay your arms around me” is played over and over during the slow motion climax of every episode. And every time the credits rolls. And on every commercial for the show.

“Dear Avery.” This is a song NBC hired James Taylor to write and sing on the season finale of 30 Rock over an ironic video montage of Jack Donaghy’s missing his wife, Avery, who’s been taken by the North Koreans.

Intangibles:

1. Two songs mentioned above that could’ve been successful on other Decemberists albums? “Don’t Carry it All” and “January Hymn."
2. Random thought: Country western isn’t Americana.
3. How does the album make me feel? Like I’m about to do the Boot Scootin’ Boogie with a bunch of 50 year old drunk folks dressed in jeans with red and blue checkered handkerchiefs around their necks. I hate that feeling.
4. Who would like this album? My mom. She’d put it into the mix with Jim Croce, Kris Kristofferson and Gordon Lightfoot. Seriously. She totally would.
5. If this would’ve been The Decemberists first album would they have made it? NO.
6. How did this album influence my opinion of Conor Oberst? It made me realize the man’s a genius. He’s not perfect but he does what he does incredibly well.
7. What did I learn from listening to this album? Snakes shouldn’t eat their tails.
   

Grades:

Tone: 1/5 I like a little less polished sound.

Voices: 2/5 Am I the only person who thinks Meloy sounds like a kindergartener?

Music: 4/5 There’s never been a doubt that The Decemberists have a lot of talent in this area.

Lyrics: 1/5 PP&P (Painfully precious and pretentious.)

Intangibles: 2/5

Final: 10/25 Not good.