You Know You Want It

Go ahead and get your free downloads of the Death Cab for Cutie Daytrotter session at this link. They are well into their 100,000th download.
Bandwidth issues, Daytrotter? Hope not. Thanks for the free tunes.

Sorry Ma, Forgot Irony Was a Dead Scene

Aww, hells yeah. The Replacement re-issues are out, finally and you can bet your penny loafers I'm gonna drop some cash on all of them. The Mats deserve nothing less. Pitchfork has reviews of the first four re-issues (Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, Stink, Hootenanny, and Let It Be) right here. Guess which one got a perfect 10.0? C'mon, guess.

Also, The Onion AV Club has an interview with Chris Carter. Anybody else besides me find it weird that another X-Files movie is coming out ten years after the shows finale? Wait a minute, who cares? There's another X-Files movie...hell yeah!

The Constantines have a video up for "Hard Feelings" the first track off of their better-than-their-last-album-but-still-not-as-good-as-the-one-before-it album Kensington Heights on their new label Arts and Crafts.




And, finally there's this:


Guess nobody told them this would only be funny for about ten seconds.

STREAM: Weezer, "Pork and Beans"

The Blind Pig

Photos are up from the Man Man show at the Village Tavern that I was at on March 7. I think they are some of my better photos--mostly because I used a flash and had some decent equipment. Follow this link to see them.

I'll be back in town this Friday from Waldorf, MD. Monday, April 28 I'll be at The Tin Roof taking pics of Athens, GA's The Winter Sounds.
I love this band and you should too. I'll post the interview I did with singer/bassist Patrick Kennan about a year ago for the now-defunct free weekly The Beat.

Thanks much to You Ain't No Picasso who has posted a free download of the entire Man Man show at The Blind Pig in Michigan. Good sound quality, too! Follow this link for all the goodness.
Note that the files are in M4A format, so get out your converters or drop them into iTunes.

Additionally, Sixeyes (have I mentioned how much I love this guy?) has reposted a free Radiohead concert, Live from BBC Radio. As the man says, get 'em while they're hot. Again, amazing sound quality. Here's the link to the goodness.

On Record Store Day I bought the new Helio Sequence album, but haven't had a chance to listen to it, yet. There's something about Maryland that makes one lethargic against all the things we should love. (They're playing the Village Tavern on May 30.) And I managed to snag a copy of Bob Marley, Legend and The Stone Roses, The Complete Stone Roses on the $1 table. I put Nirvana, Unplugged back, though now I wish I hadn't. I've got a fever for some grunge lately.

No Post-Rock for Me

Well, who would have thought that a little old instrumental band from Texas would have sold out a show in little old Charleston, SC? Actually, it makes sense when you consider the fact that they sold out two shows in Atlanta--the second show they scheduled in the middle of the afternoon to accomodate fans (wasn't that nice of them?). Needless to say, I did not have tickets and E and I turned around and went home to watch The Brothers Solomon. Which was funny.

No worries, there's always the NPR podcast of their show at the 9:3o Club in DC available for download here. (Just right click and "Save As" for the file.)

I do have an exciting announcement, however. Last Thursday, Horizon Records in Greenville, SC (one of the best record stores in the country--no, seriously) launched their spiffy new website with a certain writer who shares a name with me appearing on their blog. Yippee! It goes without saying that I am honored and thrilled to be a part of the Horizon Records family, even if it is from afar. Buy something from the site, as that is one of the new perks. And look for more postings from your faithful author soon.

I'm in Waldorf, MD for the next two weeks on business. I'm lonely and on the computer a lot so holla atcha boy if you feelin' me.

Local Edition

Check out the poster for Kulture Klash 2, April 19 a week from this Saturday. I like it.

The official description of Kulture Klash is as follows:

"Kulture Klash 2 - Event highlights the local, eclectic, and innovative creative minds in the Charleston area. A new feature this go ‘round is a week-long exhibit of all the artwork that has been installed for the event. Exhibit runs April 19-25. Sat., April 19, 7 p.m.-12 a.m."

It's in the area where the old Navy base used to be, an area that is slated for major overhaul and redevelopment.

Additionally, @ The Music Farm this Saturday I get to see EITS.

But first I got to get through the garage sale I'm having Saturday...

And sadly, I won't be able to attend Fluke this year. And that makes me sad because it's always a splendid good time. But be sure to go if you can and check out my boys at Wide Awake Press.
They are the coolest cats in the mini-comics game. Just check out this poster:


Like I said, the coolest. I'll see you guys at Heroes Con.

Much love to my G-ville peeps. Holla.

I'm Impressed

Oh, I want to hate Pitchfork. That's the hipster method of cool--but hasn't Pitchfork gone from cool to uncool back to cool and then to "who cares?"

But I have to love them when they do something this good.

Catch The Pixies doc before it disappears by next week. And I'm stoked about music videos on demand.

And so I say welcome and thanks, Pitchfork. Fuck off MTV.

Speechlessness Is Underrated

Couldn't make this up if I tried...

Any possible explanation to why this happened?

More Ghosts, Etc.

Magnolia Electric Co.—Fading Trails (Secretly Canadian, 2006)

Glossary—For What I Don’t Become (Undertow Music, 2006)

Jason Molina, the central figure behind Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. might be trying to write enough songs to create his own blues tradition. I mention the word ‘blues’ in a loose and interpretative way—Molina is not a bluesman but he is obsessed with the effect that the blues have on contemporary society and (to quote C.G. Jung) modern man in search of a soul. Most of his compositions deal directly with recurring themes of contemporary displacement; ghosts haunt men, love splits hearts in two, wolves are on the attack, and music is the only light in the darkness. Molina scours the horizons and the grimy highways of the American landscape in both his music and his troubadour lifestyle (the man is constantly on tour either alone or with his band). But the roadblock that he’s continually running up against is that even if his introspection is better than most, his music is still lagging behind him trying to thumb a ride.

MECo.’s last album, What Comes After the Blues, was a disappointing follow-up to a triumphant debut. Songs: Ohia’s final album was actually MECo.’s first; though it was titled Magnolia Electric Co. it was the first incarnation of Molina’s band. Molina could have been a Goliath in the music scene if he had maintained some sort of consistency. Unfortunately, Fading Trails is just more proof of how much he’s fallen from grace.

At nine songs, (one more than the last album) there’s a lot of empty disc space to cover. But the album is filled with too many atonal piano chords, single guitar strums, and echo-laden vocals. “Don’t Fade on Me” and “Lonesome Valley,” the first and third tracks respectively, are where you’re going to get your money. Both are reminiscent of the full band onslaught that Molina has proven he’s so adept at and both are near the front of the album giving the listener a false sense of hope for a return to form. “Montgomery,” a slapdash track that comes in at under two minutes, demonstrates with better efficiency the ‘less-is-more’ aesthetic that takes hold of the latter half of the album. Beginning around song five, the painful piano twinkled “The Old Horizon,” we get to hear the self-indulgent whimsies of songs with no backbone—and no backing band. By the time you get to the end, the whispery “Steady Now,” if you’re not already asleep it’s just because you’re in awe that you’ve come so far with little to no reward. On “A Little At a Time,” Molina asks us imploringly, “you can’t lose it all at once, can you really?” Instead of waiting for a reply, he answers his own question—“’cause brother I’ve been trying.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the road, a quintet from Murfreesboro, TN is picking the bones on the highway that Molina is tossing out and making them whole again. It might be a bit of a misnomer to associate Glossary with MECo. because the former sound more like they’ve picked up the extinguished torch that Whiskeytown dropped oh-so-many years ago and set it ablaze with new fervor.

As young as they seem, I get the feeling that these guys don’t fake their world weariness—a feeling I sometimes gather from MECo. A quick glance at their MySpace page tells you that their influences are “day jobs and student loans.” Damn right. The songs are more electric on this, their sophomore LP. Glossary’s previous LP, the superb How We Handle Our Midnights, held a few moments of quiet acoustic introspection but not so this go ‘round. Songs like “Shaking Like a Flame,” “Poor Boy,” and “Devils In the Details” come out ready to remind the listener that sometimes you need to plug in and make an electric noise to keep the darkness away.

Glossary’s songs are, like MECo.’s, a push against death and a rallying cry to enjoy life in the midst of all its misery. Even though on “Shaking Like a Flame,” we are “surrounding by rows and rows of the same house/stretched out under the sky/ like a cemetery that waits for you to die,” it’s encouraging to remember that, on “American Bruises,” we’re reminded that “bruises only last/long enough for the pain to pass.” Yeah, life sucks, especially in an era of fear-mongering, twisted rhetoric, and a general lack of intelligence and regard for human life, but rather than wallow in it, Glossary want us to find the brilliance in the simple routines of life, whether it be a good night’s sleep or remembering that life is short. Do yourself a favor, pick up both of Glossary’s albums, have a drink, and enjoy today. Tomorrow you can let the ghosts of Molina and Co. back in.