wow we are terrible at this

I thought that growing older made you grow wiser, more mature and more focused. If anything, I find myself even more afflicted by "ooh, something shiny!" syndrome, particularly when it comes to writing; I've never had the discipline to just sit down and crank out WORDS about something, even when I've been passionate about it, so on a certain fundamental level the very idea of me attempting to maintain a blog presence is laughable. Still, this is something I want to do; at one period in my life I got a lot of praise for how I put words together, so I tend to think I'm pretty good at it even if I hate doing it for extended periods of time.

I don't know what John's excuse is. Possibly the lack of sudden international superstardom based on discussing Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Gay Witch Abortion has left him jaded.

That's probably more navel-gazing than the three people who ever stumble across this thing want to read, so instead let me talk for a second about We Love:



Their debut album just came out on BPitch Control, the same label responsible for Ellen Allien, Apparat and Modeselektor. This duo is from southern Italy, yet manages to ape the cool Scandanavian vibe of The Knife well enough to make me assume on first listen that they are cut wholesale from the same Scando-Germanic cloth. This entire album panders directly to me; it starts out controlled and warm and blossoms across 11 songs into a ever-growing slab of controlled dance floor awesome. Tracks like "No Train, No Plane" (linked above) and "Hide Me" aren't what I would typically consider to the type of banging choon that would make me lose my mind, but the entire package works. Where The Knife would take a harsher edged, less subtle turn in incorporating quirkiness into their music, We Love opts for smooth cool, perhaps betraying their romantic Italian roots in the process.



The entire album may be too monochromatic for some but I defy anyone to listen to all eleven songs in isolation and not find at least one really great track.

#40 Krallice - Krallice

Well for one thing, I appreciate it when a band decides to do the whole s/t thing because that is one less thing I need to remember when talking about them, and I have a lot on my mind between eating and what's on TV and if I left the windows in the bedroom open because there is a storm brewing. This is complicated work on display here, and the members of the band have significant avant-crazo pedigrees from their previous/other bands, but what I think people tend to kind of gloss over is that there's some interesting melodic work going on under the screams and madness. Yes, the techie side is well represented, and there is much flailing of pick-hands and gnashing of teeth, but the bones lie mostly in composition, not look at me attention whoring. Much has been made of the question of whether this is really uppercase serious face Black Metal, but I think the answer is two-fold, only one half of which is "Shut the fuck up." The really great old school Black Metal out there lives and dies on composition and structure, albeit sometimes structure that is hard to glean on the first shot. SO the people that decry this band because they are too technical are like the jerks that get mad when East Bay Ray plays a non power chord and makes the Dead Kennedys all arty and not punk. Or from the school that feels like any Black Metal recording needs to be made by one lonely dude in a closet with a Fisher Price "My First 4-Track" that offs himself right after pressing the pause button and then his buddy makes 3 copies, buries two, and sends the third one to Terrorizer with dead dudes pinky toe in a baggie.

Where was I again? Oh yeah, Krallice. It's good despite the use of a saxophone in the rock idiom (ok Ihsahn gets a pass on this one too). Warning for the short attention span types bouncing up and down in their desk chairs: it's long! There is repetition! Too bad for you!

Krallice - Energy Chasms

OH DEAR A BIT DUSTY IN HERE

Yeah so obviously we here at the fantastic Blogstravaganza lack a certain what shall we call it, oh yes, DRIVE. We pull you in just to disappear again into the ether, and you stand there blinking and wondering WHAT HAVE I DONE.

Well, probably plenty. But we forgive you. We are like that.

All being a way to get back around to the idea that since you have been so nice as of late, we feel like you deserve a second chance. DON'T SQUANDER IT. This boat is leaving and either you are on it or you are TRAPPED back on the shore, shuffling home with your mud-caked hand-me-down shoes, hands in your pockets, wondering WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN.

That'll show you.

As a reward, I will be giving you a GUIDED TOUR OF LUXURY, in the guise of a boring countdown of my top 40 albums of 2005-2009, as wholly unrepresented on internet pandemic hype site ILX. So there. There will be youtubes! You might enjoy some small amount of what is contained within. There will be snacks!

(there will not actually be snacks)

A quick review of Danny Gokey's "My Best Days Are Ahead Of Me"

Dear Danny Gokey,

On your song, "My Best Days Are Ahead Of Me", you waste three precious minutes of my time to whine empty platitudes at me about how awesome it is that you are getting older. Every line seems to thrill at the prospect of using your "American Idol" experience to insinuate your way into households that only a year ago did not even know you were alive. The breathless way in which you eagerly chatter about absolutely nothing in the brightest, most chipper manner possible while assaulting poor unsuspecting listeners with a barrage of banal guitar riffs too pedestrian for Don McLean and just enough pedal steel guitar to further tarnish the legacy of country music reinforces two overriding things in a tortured, unfortunate listener:

1. As someone who was a former youth minister, you have a penchant for delivering entirely content-free messages that should make any halfway thoughtful or introspective person worry tremendously about the spiritual well-being of the children who were under your charge.
2. While, as you so fondly tell us over and over, your best days may be in front of you, our best days are most certainly behind us, because they are all of the days of our lives that occurred before we heard your awful, awful song.

Presumably this tepid offering is a harbinger of an album full of similarly vapid nonsense evoking lazy images of comfort and home with all of the originality of the Transformers movie, the passion of a wet paper bag and the musical introspection of a raucous rendition of "The Farmer in the Dell". Before inflicting this upon a public that, despite its flaws, never did anything to deserve this (aside, possibly, from slavery), I feel it is my duty as someone who has watched your transformation from the approachable blue-eyed soul singer at the original "AI" auditions into a self-important, abrasive charisma sponge to give you some long-overdue feedback:

Just stop.

Go home to your family, who loves you no matter what, and perform your wholly anonymous, embarrassing songs for them. They will give you the positive reinforcement you so desperately crave. The rest of us don't like you enough not to hurt your feelings.

Sincerely, someone about to gouge out his ears with blunt sticks.

MASSIVE ATTACK - Heligoland

Oh hey, it's 2010 and I have a music blog. I suppose I should write on it for those three stalwarts out there who follow it...




I picked up Heligoland last week with some amount of trepidation. I'd heard the song "Splitting the Atom" several months ago and thought it was nice enough, but even more on the anonymous side than what I expected; nothing about it struck me as particularly distinctive or attention-grabbing, no mean feat when one of your vocalists is the always-idiosyncratic Horace Andy. I filed it away in my mind under "pleasantly forgettable" and promptly forgot about it, moving back to having my mind blown by Owen Pallet (née Final Fantasy) and The Knife (I may have mentioned them once or twice around here...?).

I am very, very glad my completist impulses made me get this album. The opening groove, "Pray For Rain," does an excellent job of setting the tone for the album; this is a band taking the elements of past efforts that made them successful (the hip-hop sensibility of Blue Lines, the emotional heft of Protection, the paranoia-tinged sonic palette of Mezzanine and the cool stasis of 100th Window) and merging them together into a piece of work more than capable of standing with their previous efforts. From the first line sung by TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, I was hooked. The song's tone alternates between discontent and hope, a tightrope-walk of emotions that permeates the album and keeps it from becoming too much of a sad-sack affair. The album picks up steam as it progresses; "Girl I Love You" is an obvious high point that, on first listen, obscures the momentum kicked off by "Paradise Circus" (buoyed brilliantly by Hope Sandoval's fragile vocals) and carried through the end of the album. I am not going to try to convince anyone that this is an immediately-arresting album; it isn't. It is one that will sneak up on you and smack you over the head at around the 6th listen with how uniformly excellent and awesome it is.