Kablammo!

It might be spring break, but the inch of snow and slush on the ground really doesn’t make it feel like springtime. So in stead of doing anything productive, and also in stead of writing anything meaningful here, and to placate those few of you who have been telling me to update, I will now proceed to regale you with fanciful tales of the music I’ve been listening to recently.

• «Hot on the Heels of Love» — Throbbing Gristle
  Techno at its simplest, most minimalistic, earliest, and best. It revels in its pounding monotony, and you should too, since this song is far catchier than it has any right to be.
• «Down to the Waterline» — Dire Straits
  There’s a certain magical quality to the guitar work on Dire Straits’s long-playing self-titled debut album, as Rich’s fascination with «Sultans of Swing» attests. The interplay between the rhythm and lead parts is downright magical, and nowhere moreso than in «Down to the Waterline», the initial track. The album opens with a bit of noodling by the lead guitar, when suddenly the drums kick in, the lead part sounds like it has found a purpose in life, and the immaculately flanged rhythm guitar enters the right channel. Magic is made.
• «a passing feeling» — the thermals
  Allow me to quote:

  memory wise
  memory flies
  memory rarely satisfies
  the past tense
  tense and bleeding

  They sure fucking said it. And it helps that the words go along with a great song, too. In any other context, or done by most any other band, this would be a frantic and fast-paced song, but coming as it does near the end of the irrepressibly intense more parts per million EP, it feels almost gentle and soothing compared to balls-out rockers like «goddamn the light» and «i know the pattern». (The key word, of course, is ‘almost’.)

• «Sing It Again» — Beck
  This song has been earmarked for a reserved space on the ultimate “So You Just Survived a Global Thermonuclear War” mix CD. If it can’t help you cope with being one of the last inhabitants of an uninhabitable Wasteland, then nothing can. It also goes quite handily with that last drink you take at 5 in the morning.
• «What Is the Light?» — The Flaming Lips
  Combined with the two tracks immediately following it, «The Observer» and «Waitin’ for a Superman», this song forms one of the best sequences of consecutive songs on any album in recent history. The song, the sequence, and the album (the phenomenal The Soft Bulletin) all contain carefully balanced measures of crushing sadness, plaintive hopefulness, and guarded exuberance. It’s a beautiful effect, and it makes for beautiful songs, like this one for example. Wayne Coyne sings his poor little heart out, and you can’t help but be moved.
• «Metsik Häda» — Kuldne Trio
  Europop meets «Hava Nagila» and everyone’s a winner! Why should the Jews be the only ones to enjoy this song?
• «The Late Great Libido» — Menomena
  I am incapable of saying enough good things about this song, so I won’t even really put forth more than a token effort. I wouldn’t know where or how to begin, really. Please just trust me when I say it’s a fine piece of work, and worth listening to repeatedly.

Song of the Moment: «Fall in a River» — Badly Drawn Boy

So it’s come to this, has it? USB knives and pedal-powered masturbation machines? At least I have these rap chips to keep myself satisfied.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, it seems my chum Paul has come under fire recently, drawing the ire of PETA and other organizations that are equally adorable and cute in their naïveté and lack of even a single clue. But don’t take my word for it.

What you should take my word for, of course, is this. Tell me what you think, regarding both content and presentation thereof.

Song of the Moment: «The Late Great Libido» — Menomena

Happy birthday, Matt.

Foreign types with the hookah pipes say ay oh way oh, ay oh way oh.

Song of the Moment: «Basket Case» — Green Day

Apparently nothing all that bad came from my decision to rip some 30 of my CDs to --aps VBR MP3s last night instead of studying for the Space Dynamics midterm I had today. I’d have probably fared even better if I hadn’t stayed up procrastinating for the 26 hours immediately prior to the exam, but all things considered it went pretty well.

EAC does an astonishingly good job of ripping music from woefully mistreated CDs, even CDs that have been scratched and abused to the extent that they’re no longer opaque throughout, meaning that they have undergone significant and irreparable data loss. It’s no exaggeration to say my mind is boggled by just how skilled this program is. Plus it’s free!

Liina: thanks again for that WHFS Just Passin’ Thru CD. Although it just sat around for a few years without being fully appreciated, today I realized just how good it is. Hell, it even has everybody’s favourite lead singer of the Lemonheads acoustically covering everybody’s favourite alliteratively-named insane drunken country musician.

Song of the Moment: «The Streets of Baltimore» — Evan Dando

Well I’ll be damned. It looks like Nina Jelen’s big brother Ben Jelen is in the process of making it big; you know, appearing on VH1 and that kind of thing. Good for him? Je crois que oui. “Come On“, which appears to be his ‘big song’, unfortunately sems to be Lite-FM-bound, but that could just be the production. Nobody needs that kind of string presence in a pop song. Judging from the comments on this blog, though, that sappiness might just be Ben’s ticket for the gravy train to… gravytown.

In other news:

• When will people learn to not trust the internet? After they got fired from their cushy jobs at a TV station, no doubt.
• Spam turned 10 yesterday. And today all my email consists of crap like “YOU WON A FREE VACATION” and “”want something?^ zyjhdfae”. Whee.
• My iRank is probably even lower than my PageRank. epenis--;
• Gates: ‘I Am A Stupid Nerd’. It costs money to send physical postage, and yet proportionately I get just as much physical spam as electronic. Donate computer time to distributed computing projects? That’s your prerogative. Force people to do so in order to be able to use email, one of the oldest uses of the intarweb? That’s bullshit. Who decides what projects are valid recipients of computer time, anyway? What if I think an X-Box decryption project is what I want to support, Bill?
• Lucasarts: ‘We Are Smacktards!’

Song of the Moment: «Superfly» — Curtis Mayfield

Maybe I’m crazy, but I’m thinking that TV needs a show called “Prognosis: Murder”, possibly starring Dick Van Dyke. If he has an evil twin, that would be even better choice.

Song of the Moment: «I’m Not the Droid You’re Looking For» — Grand Moff Tarkin

Last night I had several dreams, but one in particular stood out and stayed with me after I awoke. In the dream, I had gone to a party at a friend’s house and stayed the night. The next morning, I couldn’t find my special class ring. I searched high and low, and accused all the other partygoers of horrible theft, but my search and my inquest were both equally fruitless. Everybody who was there was concerned and helpful at first, but grew exasperated and indifferent as I became an angrier and more pushy jackass with each successive wasted minute of my futile pursuit.

Then, in the dream, a sudden realization stopped me in my tracks like the Enola Gay stopping this wristwatch: I had dreamed the ring. The ring was a fiction created by my drunken mind the night before, and I had awoken from the dream within a dream, and been unable to explain why it was not on my finger, where I distinctly remembered placing it.

Immediately upon coming to the conclusion that I had been dreaming, I awoke, glanced over at the class ring sitting stoically on my shelf, and fell back asleep.

Song of the Moment: «Do You Believe Her?» — The Raveonettes