j/k.

okay so it’s been awhile, so here are some random pieces of poop and shit:

• new chad van gaalen is quite excellent. it is called soft airplane.. and so far i like it more than any of his other stuff. but i have never really listened to his other stuff all that much, so you be the judge on that call.

• i am addicted to pinball. my favorite games are addams family and the twilight zone. i also quite like terminator 2, batman, jurassic park and tales of the arabian nights. but, can someone please teach me how to do an effing bangback??? omg i can’t get them to work :(

• the new kings of muh-fuxxin leon is soooooo amazingly exceptional i don’t even know how to describe it. the opener, “closer” and final song, “cold desert” are like the greatest songs of the year i swear. by the way the album is called only by the night. and if you steal buy less than 10 albums this year, this should be one of them.

boring.• tv on the radio still bores me. aside from their amazing first ep and “wolf like me” they have always just bored the shit out of me and every album lets me down. the new one is the same. i listened to it twice in a row and still barely remember a thing about it except there was a weird rapping song and another song that was kind of good.

RIP :(• MITCH HEDBERG‘S NEW ALBUM HAS LEAKED!!@!@!! omg it is hilarious as usual. listen to it asap whilst drinking delicious booze. it is called do you believe in gosh RIP

• tonight i will be listening to the new: mogwai, damien jurado and mount eerie (with julie doiron and fred squire, omg!). i am hoping they are all amazing. read this blog for updates !!!! :)

• me and alan have started an all-defense fantasy football league. week 1 was a success, i do believe. the point system rewards big plays and all-around awesome defensive dudes. check it out:

Tackle Solo (1)
Sack (10)
Interception (15)
Fumble Force (11.5)
Fumble Recovery (11.5)
Touchdown (20)
Safety (17.5)
Pass Defended (1.25)
Block Kick (10)

we are starting 4 DBs, 5 DLs and 1 DB/DL flex. this is like my favorite fantasy football league ever so far. week 1 saw kyle vanden bosch (who grew up less than 30 minutes from me, btw!) and demarcus ware, and lance briggs and james harrison (48 points!!!!) load up on the destruction. i lost my inaugural game thanks to benching all the players that played well (including vanden bosch, dammit).

• lol @ tom brady

• ummm new dexter, it’s always sunny in philadelphia AND entourage, mtherfuckers. are you ready? omfg.

• macgyver: still the greatest show in the history of man. i have been spending like every night drinking and watching macgyver until 6am lately. the best episodes are these, btw, if you are a macgyver n00b:

NUMBER FUCKING ONE aka the most amazing macgyver episode ever ever ever is:
“Two Times Trouble”
MacGyver’s rock singer friend Roxie (Audrey Landers)

macgyver is cooler than you could ever possibly dream of being, even if you dreamt you were macgyver.thinks her twin sister Carla is trying to kill her. Terry David Mulligan as Frank Rogan, Babs Chula as Eve, Dana Still as Dr. Farrell, Max Reimer as The Devil, Kymberly Sheppard as The Victim.

number two (a very close second) is the amazing baseball card episode:
“Squeeze Play”
A baseball counterfeit memorabilia ring attempts to blackmail the daughter of a former baseball player. Kent McCord as Novus Riley, Malcolm Stewart as Bill Marsh, Tim Rossovich as Willard, Catherine Zak as Wendy Riley, Reggie Jackson as Himself, Della Reese as Mama Colton, William Samples as Eli, Brock Johnson as Store Manager.

number three is a tie between the one where macgyver is led on a scavenger hunt to track down a diamond that macgyver can only find using clues from his memories of harry when macgyver was a kid (hahaha)
“Harry’s Will”
A kooky bunch of crooks and an elderly ex-con pursue MacGyver’s inherited station wagon thought to hold treasure. Lyle Alzado as Tiny, John Anderson as Harry Jackson, Dick Butkus as Earl Dent, James Doohan as Speedy, Henry Gibson as Chicken Habit Customer, Sandra Gould as Woman at the Soup Kitchen, Rich Little as Biff Arnold, Marion Ramsey as Police Officer, Marion Ross as Sister Robin, Jesse White as Mel, Wendy O. Williams as Big Mama, Abe Vigoda as Bill Cody, Shane Meier as Young MacGyver, Henry Winkler as Wilton Newberry.

AND the amazing one where the crazy kid freaks out after a physics competition
“Hell Week”
MacGyver is picked to judge a contest at his old college, but an upset student makes a bomb which MacGyver must defuse.

also blossom was on a bunch of episodes of macgyver lol

• best album of 2002 coming soon!!!

<3

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2001

National Skyline
This=Everything
(Epic)

A lot of great albums came out in 2001, such as The Appleseed Cast’s atmospheric double album, Low Level Owl, a stunning return to form from The Brian Jonestown Massacre (Bravery, Repetition and Noise), outstanding albums from Frank Black & the Catholics, Juno, Moonbabies, my favorite New Order record, Get Ready, The Faint’s best, Danse Macabre and probably Mercury Rev’s best (All is Dream). Also, the absolutely stunning and haunting This=Everything by National Skyline, and great stuff from Pinback, S, The Shins, Spoon, Sparklehorse, The Strokes, Vincent Gallo and Weezer (despite its unfairly received hatred).

Those albums are mostly on the same page for me, but The Faint, BJM and National Skyline rise above the pack. I LOVE LOVE LOVE Bravery, Repetition and Noise, but as great as it is, it just isn’t quite as good as This=Everything, which is just so raw and haunting and beautiful and rainy and FUCKING PERFECT. Holy OMFG I love this album so much, so it gets the slight edge.

EDIT// I just realized that The Microphones’ absolute masterpeice, The Glow Pt 2., was released in ‘01 (I always thought it was 2002). While I think I am still going to barely pick This=Everything, this decision just got 10100000000x harder.

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my beloved dudes and dudettes: i am so sorry for failing to update this blog for like the past forever of time. i have been so busy drinking booze and hanging out with my babe i have ttly not even had time to write anything, ever.

also, i just bought rock band and omfg if i have not been playing that game and drinking tons of booze like non-stop for the past 3 days.

so here are some newsworthy things:

item #1: alan made me listen to the new beck album, modern guilt, and even though i don’t ever really listen to beck (like, ever), and have never really listened to beck, and never really got into any of his seminal work (even though i don’t hate him), this is a pretty good damn record i’m not going to lie. you should probably listen to it. thanks, alan. i love you (but you already know that)

item #2: the new albert hammond, jr. record is so atrociously fucking bad i am not even going to write more than this single sentence about it.

item #3: finally! new cansei de ser sexy (css). omfg i have been waiting for so long. unfortunately, the new album (called donkey aka a giant wtf @ that for a record title) is like 10x more boring than their last, but still it’s pretty good and i can’t say i’m not going to be listening to it a bunch.

item #4: new fucking walkmen, bitches. O.M.F.G. yes. it’s called you & me and it’s ttly good, and also, it gets better with each listen (it was like 100000million times better today than it was yesterday, which was still good). track #3, “on the water” is pretty much completely amazing.

item #5: fantasy baseball, i hate you. i hate you. why is my team so amazing when it doesn’t have to be, but when i just need like basically nothing to beat the worst team in the whole fucking league i can’t even manage 1 hr and 3 rbi’s for the entire week.

item #6: i can’t believe i just recently discovered tourette’s guy on youtube. best videos i have ever seen, ever. why has no one showed me these like 4 years ago!!! where are you people !??!

item #7: oh yeah. i made this new mix, for my new babe, which is pretty cool. you ttly might like it if you like chillaxed kite-flying sunday-afternoon type mixes with acoustic guitars and shit like that. you can download them, if you want.

1. this will destroy you – leather wings
2. mazarin – another one goes by
3. why? – the hollows
4. islands – creeper
5. yeasayer – wait for the summer
6. portugal. the man – shade
7. margot & the nuclear so-so’s – quiet as a mouse
8. voxtrot – kid gloves
9. murder by death – ash
10. meredith bragg – turns out you won
11. sparklehorse – hundreds of sparrows
12. okay – natural
13. beach house – d.a.r.l.i.n.g.
14. folksongs for the afterlife – dark room
15. mazzy star – halah
16. rocky votolato – silver trees
17. n.lannon – spy
18. wilco – impossible germany
19. modest mouse – willful suspension of disbelief
20. band of horses – lamb on the lam (in the city)

[download (73.7mb)] single file mp3
[download (73.6mb)] .zip with individual tracks

item #8: re-reading that tracklist, i realized i have never written about how AMAAZINGFLY AWESOME that new murder by death album (red of tooth and claw) is. so so good. go listen to it right now.

——i promise i will try to update you, dear readers, more often than this. i am a bastard. i am a douche.

<3

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i am back from being dead, sort of. lots of updates to fill you dudez+babes in on. here are some:

• weezer’s red album is pretty rad/good/amazing/average, all at once. “pork and beans” is one of the greatest songs cuomo has ever written, not to mention the video is possibly the greatest thing EVER MADE EVER (below).

other highlights are “heart songs”, with absolutely brilliant lyrics; including this gem:

and also, the completely insane “the greatest man that ever lived”. overall this record is leaps and bounds above the subpar make believe

• the dandy warhols’ new record, earth to the dandy warhols is also pretty damned good. i’ll admit i wasn’t digging it much at first, but after leaving it on repeat all night it grew on me just as much as their others. “now you love me” is a stunning fuzzed-out lovefest on par with “good morning”, “heavenly”, etc.

• ratatat – lp3 is pretty good, albeit, somewhat more chill than their first two albums. the opening trifecta of “shiller”, “falcon jab” and “mi viejo” are particular good. “gipsy threat” is just weird and creepy as hell.

• mates of state’s latest, re-arrange us, is pretty happy-go-lucky, as we’ve come to expect from such a lovestricken husband-and-wife duo. but that’s, of course, a good thing when it comes to mates of state. still, i can’t say i liked this as much as their more recent efforts, especially the epic bring it back.

• a few albums that i missed last year: the first, (i had no idea that) meredith bragg & the terminals realeased a new album in 2007. which they did, titled silver sonya, and which also, is amazing — even greater than their debut. HIGHLY recommend this record, which would have easily been in my top 15 or so of ‘07. another which i keep meaning to write about, that i learned about from good old sebastian, is junius, who play a brand of post-hardcore similar to the more melodic aspects of deftones or the more fuzz-drenched passages of maserati or cave in. their jawdropping self-titled debut was far and away one of the better records of 2007. “hiding knives” is just unreal.

• also thanks to sebastian’s writeups, i have recently been revisiting wire’s seminal work. i have been particularly enjoying 1979’s 154 and ’78’s chairs missing. though admittedly it takes a bit of work to fully begin appreciating them, i’m still not quite sure what took me so long to be able to love these albums.

• the hold steady has a new album (stay positive), but as someone who has never really enjoyed the band that much (save for the unquestionably amazing “how a resurrection really feels”, from 2005’s separation sunday), i won’t write too much about it. i’ve given it a couple of listens, and can’t say i dislike it, but as per usual, nothing sticks out either.

• finally, dead meadow released their new record some 5 months ago now, and i keep meaning to post a review of it, but my laziness has fucked you again, dear reader. nevertheless, in my opinion, it’s their best to date, which may mean that it’s your least favorite (if you’re a legit dead meadow fan). because the same things that make me like it most (it’s more structured, more pop-oriented, more accessible), are probably the things that are turning longtime fans away. the first half of the album is particularly impressive. “down here” is brilliant.

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• ariel pink’s haunted graffiti – underground
the latest opus of lo-fi insanity from cult hero ariel pink is another strange, hallucinatory journey through a collage of twisting melodies, noisy interims and brilliant songwriting that combine together to form a surprisingly coherent, cohesive whole on par with the year’s best records.

• jackie-o motherfucker – valley of fire
psych-travelling, avant garde collective’s newest is a delicate, dreamy foray into the subversive underworld of free-jazz, meditative folk and extreme creep-outs — an intangible mess or intricate beauty and subdued weirdness.

• parts & labor – mapmaker
third proper full-length from new york insaniacs is a mountainous wall-of-sound that seamlessly melds delicious melodies with abrasive noise and tumultuous rhythms to produce an uncategorizable stampede of experimental rock (think sonic youth meets the stone roses in a psychotic ward).

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a decent version of the brian jonestown massacre’s new masterpiece, my bloody underground, appears to have surfaced online a couple of weeks ago, (it is a bit different than the preview available from the band’s website this summer). and holy omfg is all i can say about this record. this is by far the saddest, most heartfelt, most disturbing collection of music i have heard from anton newcombe. and by that i don’t mean the typically sad music we have all come to expect from him. this is genuinely filled with an underlying, doomstricken hopelessness that manifests from his proverbial inner hanging gallows. i would honestly not be surprised if this is the last recording the band ever releases. and, in all sincerity, it would be a perfect swan song.

bjm’s first full-length in over four years, my bloody underground mixes the band’s distinguished blend of druggy, neo-psychedelia with an intensified sense of mood and atmosphere. most of the tracks found on this album are much less songs than they are strange, meandering collections of ambience: brain synapses, otherwordly anthems. “we are the niggers of the world” is a brilliantly sad piano piece, littered with mistakes and solecisms which only add to the album’s overtly haunting feeling of solitude. “dropping bombs on the whitehouse“, “yeah-yeah“, “golden frost” and “kicking jesus” bring typical bjm to mind, but these songs are more cruel than their predecessors — almost unsympathetic in a completely paradoxical way. (the songs themselves are rather quiet and most of the time even unobtrusive, yet the underlying tone still comes across as an enthusiastic fuck-you to anyone listening.)

an overwhelming shroud of insanity seems to blanket the remainder of the record: and that’s not a bad thing, as they perfectly complement their counterparts — hurling themselves in and out of existence with a blissful, narcissistic arrogance. these beautifully desperate clips infinitely magnify any feeling mankind has ever felt (the aforementioned “we are the niggers of the world“; the ethereal, mbv-inspired “ljosmyndir“; the hell-on-earth creepout of “automatic faggot for the people“; the despondent, aimless drifting of “dark wave driver / big drill car“).

my bloody underground is neurotic and restless and moody and brilliant. and the ultimate result is an experience that will enthrall and possibly terrify — a flawless coalescence of the band’s fifteen year back catalogue.

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dudes plus babes & bff’s
1. panther – use your mouth breathe
2. holy fuck – the pulse
3. justice – d.a.n.c.e.
4. junior senior – move your feet
5. the go! team – keys to the city
6. justice vs. simian – we are your friends
7. c.s.s. – meeting paris hilton
8. the kbc – trippin’
9. primal scream – swastika eyes (jagz kooner mix)
10. dope stars inc. – self destructive corp.
11. wizardzz – sailship
12. mstrkrft – street justice
13. chromeo – fancy footwork (strip steve you & i remix)
14. daft punk – around the world (killdahype remix)
15. midnight juggernauts – road to recovery (miami horror remix)
16. klaxons – golden skans (sebastian remix)
17. m83 – teen angst (bird peterson thud mix)
18. simian mobile disco – it’s the beat (the teenagers remix)
19. veronica lipgloss & the evil eyes – let me see your eyes

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i went to go see bears here in phoenix tonite, and WTF THEY WERE DONE PLAYING by the time i got there :’( i was so ttly sad it was horrible. i wanted to die, i wanted to slit my wrists (remember: it’s down the river not across the stream), i wanted to kill, i wanted to stab, i was so pissed. however i met all the bears dudes and they were all ttly awesome and gave me a tour ep with FOUR (count them, FOUR) brand new songs. let’s hear it for bears, they are awesome and THEY NEED A FUCKING LABEL DICKBAGS. someone sign them plz kthx omfg. THEY ARE TOURING RIGHT NOW SO GO SEE THEM AND BE HAPPIER THAN I WAS :/

also, dear bears if you read this i <3 u

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the go team’s new album proof of youth leaked a few days ago and it is ttly filled with sweet
sweet jams (“keys to the city”) and neo-zelda themesongs (“patricia’s moving picture”) and schoolyard 4-square chants (“flashlight fight”) and funky guns-a-blazin’ grooves (“titanic vandalism”) and motivational speaking anthems (“doing it right”) and sim city background music (“my world”). basically this record is a requirement. also, basically it sounds exactly like what the cover looks like.

EDIT/// FUCK YOU websheriff. i hope no one buys this album and the go! team doesn’t gain any new fans.

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anything associated with wolf parade is good and this is no exception.handsome furs‘ (featuring none other than dan boeckner of wolf parade) first record (plague park) is here and it is what you probably expect (good). basically, it takes dan’s weird, quivering wolf parade vocals and replaces the music with a sort of artsy panache somewhat evocative of tv on the radio. kind of sad, kind of muted, but still expressive(!), plague park stumbles around kind of like a drunken teenager in a small town and vomits sweetness. “handsome furs hate the city” is sort of like two moments in one: (1) at 4am when you are moderately drunk and walking around listening to music in a suburban town somewhere and no one is awake and you start wondering if they are all dead because they might as well be dead, and (2) when you are driving through traffic at lunchtime and the cars are barely moving and even though there are hundreds or thousands of people around it kind of seems like there are none and that everything is just a vaguely sculpted pseudo-reality of humanity and culture and you start to wonder wtf everything is really about anyway.

with so many deliberately vicious, vitriolic reminders of the mundanity of our lives, this album’s cunning melodies will ttly stop your heart in a way that you thought was only possible with booze. really, this record is about as close as you’ll get to being sad and walking around town late at night drinking a 40 without actually doing it.

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