those crazy kids from around the block
Current Mood:
Waking Up
I have been reading the allmusic blog lately. It’s quite an excellent mash-up of info about all parts of the music world. If you are a real explorer of sound, the blog is for you.
The latest entry is the history behind “Cotton-Eyed Joe”, which apparently has a lot more history than I ever knew.
The blog entry can be found here.
So I got one of the larger shipments of CD’s today (somewhere around 115), got them all in the database and have continued on my quest to rip every CD I have to lossless (again). Currently, I have over 700 done and until I got the latest crop, it’s been going pretty quickly (these have some issues and rip slowly). A good chunk of the CD’s I got were a random “rap/hip-hop/r&b” lot of 90+ CD’s. It actually turned out to be pretty good; about 60 CD’s I care to own, 5 that I already had, 25 or so that are meh, and only 5-6 that are a complete waste of time.
Not bad for $65 shipped.
I’ve also been selling stuff out of my lab lately on Fleabay. It’s net’d me some pretty alright cash to upgrade some things (mostly disk capacity, but I’m also looking at server upgrades). I am, however, reminded that selling stuff on ebay, even a small amount, can end up being a part time job.
At least I have some good music to listen to while I’m doing it and my home rig is pretty excellent these days. Here’s a pic from what was a couple of minutes before this post was made.
Current Mood:
Chillin
Based on who-knows-what, Amazon told me that I wanted this disc. It’s spooky sometimes how close Amazon’s “we believe you’ll like this” group of items is right on the money.
Mofro is good time, funky blues music, reminiscent of the dirtier blues-rock of bands like Rare Earth and Booker T & The MG. It’s full of organs, horns, gritty guitars and funky bass… a combo that instantly makes me listen, draws me in and plays to a part of my soul that I rarely get to see.
This kind of music evokes that same kind of emotion some get from their mom’s chocolate chip cookies. It’s that comfortable part of times-gone-past. It’s not too often that an album evokes this kind of emotion, but since I’ve purchased this album, I’ve probably listened to it 50+ times.
Not only is the music that great, but it’s a sonically wonderful recording with great emotion in the recording. You can tell the engineer loved recording the music as much as the band loved playing it.
Grey is a very impressive, soulful vocalist. These songs come from his gut. His emotion overflows out of his vocals. You can hear that he was in a different place when recording this album. The band is the same way. They own these songs. Raw emotion just can’t be faked and you can hear it on this record.
This album comes highly recommended if you like the aforementioned groups as well as things like Robert Randolph and the Family Band and even perhaps if you like Creedence Clearwater Revival, though I think Grey is a bit more laid-back than the Fogerty’s were.
For today’s Back Catalog Album Review, I’ve been listening to Paolo Nutini’s “These Streets”. This is a fine disc, beginning to end, full of well thought out, excellently arranged pop. Nutini has one of the more unique male voices with one of the largest ranges in pop music today. His falsetto is clear, crisp, and he doesn’t sound like the usual whisky and cigarettes have taken their tole on his pipes.
Much of the lyrical content is as young as Paulo is, but I sense that as he gets older, given the chance, he may come up with more to say than the usual tales of heartbreak, regret, and redemption. That’s not to say that he’s not a wordsmith in his own right. That would be a blatant lie. But a wordsmith with little to say yet is probably the right statement.
There is a nice blend of upbeat tracks as well as a few ballads that do well to show off Nutini as not just another pop voice that should fade into the wind.
Current Mood: Chillin
Tonight, I’m listening to “City Beach” by Jill Cunniff, former member of the smooth-pop mega-chick-pop band, Luscious Jackson. Jill was apparently a good part of the brains behind that band, as evidenced by the above-par songwriting on this disc.
If you are into dreamy electro-pop, this is a disc for you. Her approach to the genre, like everything Luscious Jackson is incredibly sultry and sexy. I think I find Jill’s solo effort a lot more satisfying beginning to end than any of LJ’s albums. The arrangements are tight and interesting and the sonics on this album are some of the best I’ve heard on a pop album.
It’s a downright pleasure to listen to. The horns are well-recorded; vocals are perfect and no where does it sound flat, but is totally vibrant through and through. This is an album that helps me remember the warm nights of summer during this long cold winter.
While she doesn’t have much to say, she makes up for that with nimble wordsmithing and smart arrangements on an album where only three out of twelve tracks pass the four minute mark. She certainly knows that too much of a good thing can ruin the experience.
So I’ve been re-cataloging and re-ripping my CD collection to FLAC as I talked about in a previous post. It’s really turned into quite a chore; with three machines setup to rip CD’s. I’m now getting about 10-15 CD’s an hour ripped, which means that at something like 1000 CD’s to rip, it’ll be done sometime in June.
Looking at the stacks remaining is a little disheartening; especially considering I have about 120 CD’s that I haven’t even put into my database yet because they don’t have barcodes and initial searches didn’t turn anything up. A lot of them are local bands and obscure stuff that will probably have to be entered manually.
The good side-effect of this is that all our music will be tagged properly, have album covers, and will be easy to use in a media-center type application that I have running on the PC hooked up to the TV.
I’ve also had the opportunity to spend some quality time with the music collection and I suspect that I will be posting a great deal more album reviews. Look for them under the naming scheme “BCAR: <Arist Name>”. I’m going to change the headlines of the one’s I’ve already done to that for consistency.
Look for the jello and pudding shot recipes from NYE 07 later tonight or tomorrow if you’re interested.
Current Mood:
Happy
The holiday continues, and so does my seemingly unending listening marathon. Today, our friends from Amazon dropped off a little package of joy that included the Harry Potter HD DVD set (Char’s XMas gift for herself) and a couple of CD’s including Donovan Frankenreiter’s “Move by Yourself”.
It’s jumpy bouncy music, contrasted by Donovan’s more-than-laid-back voice. Several of the tracks groove very hard for hippy white guy music. “Fool” could easily find itself on the soundtrack of a 70’s blacksploitation flick. The whole album is a great afternoon soundtrack; not a single track I find myself skipping past.
“That’s Too Bad (Byron Jam)” is one of the single best soul/rock songs I’ve heard in years. This album officially crossed into “heavy rotator” status upon hearing this tune. While he doesn’t really break new ground with this album, it is recorded well and is just plain good music to listen to.
I was first introduced to Frankenreiter on a television show called Live From Abbey Road on Sundance. His live band is amazing and he is as talented live as he is recorded. The recording engineers didn’t have to do much other than to make sure the tape was running.
I think Frankenreiter is unfairly compared to his buddy, Jack Johnson, simply because they are both surfers-turned-musicians and have a very laid-back Cali vibe. Frankenreiter, however, is very electric and blues/funk focused, more like G Love’s less hip-hop works than Jack Johnson. Though if you like Jack’s rendition of ‘Rodeo Clowns’ on G Love’s “Philadelphonic”, you’ll probably like this disc as much as I do.
Current Mood: Chillin
It’s that time of year again. No. Not -that- time, but it has something to do with it. I’m given a good long stretch by the corporation between the holidays to sit on my fat butt and do a lot of things that I love to do, the most important of which is to get re-acquainted with my ever-expanding music collection.
A while ago, I lost a hard drive array; the one that contained all my music. I have ripped all of my CD’s to lossless format (FLAC) for playback via the various computers around here or for further processing to MP3.
Having lost all the lossless sources, I have set out to re-rip a good portion of the collection. A friend has a good portion of the collection backed up for me (we back up each other’s important data), but I have decided that many of the discs weren’t ripped with enough attention to detail and thus, the more important stuff is getting that attention.
This is an arduous task and presents me with an opportunity to spend some quality time listening to various records that I might not have had the time for before. For example, presently, I’m listening to “Sounds from the Verve Hi-Fi” by Thievery Corporation.
It is as excellent a jazz comp as there ever was. Very 50’s beat-jazz; almost “loungy”, but not cheeky. Considering the wide range of artists and timeframes (it spans the 50’s-70’s), Thievery has done an excellent job of putting together a disc that like all Thievery outings creates a certain mood from beginning to end and does not feeling jarring at all; unlike other “jazz greatest” comps we’ve all come to know and loathe.
Current Mood:
Lovey & 
Martini Mood
I feel like it’s Spring time weather right now with the rain and slush in the 43 degree Farenheit weather. The picture to the left, is the actual one for tonight’s forcast from the National Weather Services website. Last night, however, it was an icy winter skating rink! We had found out a band we enjoy seeing when we can, Hello Dave, was playing here in GR. FABULOUS we thought! I arranged for a babysitter, and we were leaving around 6:30. It had begun sleeting of sorts, and the roads were just messy with slush. No huge worries, as it just meant I had to take my time. We made our way down town to find large amounts of traffic around Van Andel…we forgot that the Trans Siberan Orchestra was in town clogging up traffic. Our plan was to eat at a place relatively close to the bar the band was playing…however by the time we got there they had an hour and 45 minute wait. We ended up down at the new Founders Brewery for a sandwich and a beer. They recently moved to a new building, and it’s VERY nice on the inside. Currently they only have a few beers on tap, but it made for a quick and easy dinner that was very tasty! When we left we headed for our next destination The Whiskey Lounge. We have never been to this place, and while the ride there was scary…we might go back if the right band is playing. We headed down Grandville from the brewery to Franklin, making a right on Martha. This is the scariest road I’ve EVER driven down on a snowy, slushy, sleeting night. You crest the top of the hill to see pretty much a straight drop down drop to a fence that ends the road onto Godfrey. I was stumped on how we were going to get out of there once we saw the band play. Thankfully one of our friends gave us another road to use that was switch backed up the hill to civilization.
The show was awesome. For probably about the 2nd time in my entire history of seeing this band I was sober. It wasn’t a bad thing, I was trying to stay responsible and sober so I could get us up the hill home without dieing! They played a killer closer with a Pink Floyd cover of “Another Brick in the Wall”. For some strange reason, I have a deep love for Pink Floyd. I think it has a lot to do with my brother Larry & I experimenting with my parents 8 track player when we were younger…as they had lots of music from that genre. That and we grew up in a house listening to classic rock on occasion. Their cover was Great Faboulous FANTANSTIC though, and I could do nothing but get up and shake my booty to it singing along. This song also brings back fond memories of living with my roomie in college Beeko. The semester I did my teaching internship he would come in my room just about every morning singing “Charma, leave those kids alone”. It makes me giggle every time I hear the song.
We left the bar just after 1am to find our car completely covered in ice. The roads were okay so long as you were on a main road, but once you got on the side streets it was slick driving. We made it home without incident. Well, I almost slid on my butt trying to make it from the car into the house. Our street, sidewalk, and porch steps were extremely slick! Thankfully there was still enough snow underneath the ice I could dig my feet into the icy snow to make my way up the stairs to the porch. I was just concentrating on not falling and getting a wet a##. I can’t imagine how retarted we would have looked had we actually gotten somewhat drunk. We paid our sitter, told her to be careful, and crashed out on the couch for a few minutes before heading up the stairs to some slumber.
Today has been pretty quiet. I de-smoked myself from the bar funk by getting a shower, and we pretty much lounged about all day. I did a few loads of laundry - I’m still catching up from last weekend, and read through the paper. Still no Christmas tree up, I have a feeling that we’ll be working on that tomorrow or late in the week depending on how much we have going on. I don’t know why, but for some reason I am just in no hurry to get it up yet. I think the early Christmas in the stores has me almost Christmased out before it’s even really started. I have started shopping for a few people already, so that’s underway. Hopefully that won’t sneak up on me too soon too!
Well, I leave you with a few shots of Hello Dave. They are from Chicago, and I highly encourage you to go check out their webpage and MySpace page to listen to some jams! They are a sort of countrified rock and soul group with nothing but good music that makes you want to dance (even when the weather is bad). CHEERS!
Current Mood: Happy & Jammin’
Giants. What or Who’s that you ask….an awesome geek rock band that we went to go see on Tuesday night. I still have “Particle Man” and “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”stuck in my head. We had a great time seeing the show at The Intersection; as we always do. We ended up meeting up with one of my pal’s from playgroup (no the playgroup is not for us….it’s for the kids) after talking about it at playgroup earlier that morning. I’m so glad that M & J were able to get tickets to join us because we had a great time hanging out with them. Not that we don’t love our children, but it’s always nice to get out with adults and discuss adult things. We found out that we had a lot more in common than just belonging to our MOMS Club, and our daughters being great pals. Hopefully we’ll be able to hang out again soon outside of playgroup. The show was awesome, as I said, despite the opening act sucking…badly. They were a 2 man band (literally) playing instruments over a loop (bad ones I might add), and they even used an air horn during a song to see if you were paying attention.
The pictures above are not from our show, just ones I saved by searching for They Might Be Giants in Google’s Images. We tried to get a couple of pics on our new cheap bar cams….but the camera’s turned out to be just that - cheap. Apparently the pictures we did take were quite blurry, and the videos we tried to take didn’t come out that great. Which is a bummer, because they played “Alphabet of Nations” one of Clare’s favorite songs. Yes, people, this band is Kid Friendly - one of the other great things I like about them. They even have a couple of kid albums out, one entirely about the alphabet “Here Come the ABC’s”. Clare loves to sing them, especially “Flying V”. Most of their songs are about things that you learn about in life - real things, not just love and heart break, and how to shake your booty…one of the reasons I call geek rock. That and I’ve never seen so many guys in one bar with striped sweaters on in one night!
Oh, and if you’d like a free listen and another site to look at feel free to check out their MySpace page.
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