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July 28, 2009
Intermission (moving again)
Ra Ra Riot - St. Peter's Day Festival
Beulah - The Battle Cry of the West
Moving from FL to PA this week. Lots of sweating to do! And driving. If you've never had a crisis of identity and really want to, hop in your car and drive for 17 hours in any direction. I assure you that the experience will make you question yourself in crazy, otherwise unimaginable ways. Every time I make the drive from Florida to Pennsylvania, there's a point, maybe 3/4s of the way through, when I ask myself in delirious earnestness, Who Am I? (this is usually after taking a nap at a rest station, etc.). When I arrive home, I always feel like I've been trapped in a sensory deprivation tank. Three song mix, all good & salutary in their own ways.
Posted by Kevin at 05:20 PM
July 24, 2009
"Like Buddha" is my least favorite simile
Haruomi Hosono & Tadanori Yokoo - Hum Ghar Sajan (from Cochin Moon)
Everything must be on the internet now, as Jaime said, because I was finally able to find this album, Cochin Moon, that I've been searching for longer than I care to remember. The story behind this LP, as I understand it, was that Hosono took a trip to India and came back so inspired that he wrote the soundtrack to a non-existent Bollywood movie. This track in particular is a good example of Hosono's meshing of his own weird sounds with classic Indian pop song features, e.g. this is very much like something you'd hear in a movie like Dil Se or Lagaan (maybe not) re-recorded by Black Dice circa their Miles of Smiles EP. More on this later.
Posted by Kevin at 03:46 PM
July 21, 2009
What Happens to Teeth, Motherfucker--
Many are probably familiar with that first track, Dream City, which bites just a tiny bit on T. Rex to my mind (esp. the beginning), but probably not with the second (and arguably better) track, Get Real. That Hockey Night album, Keep Guessin (on Lookout Records, I think), is a total gem. Although when I first heard it (after hearing the Free Energy track in May), I thought, wow, sounds like the singer really loves Malkmus a whole lot. But he doesn't sing like that in Free Energy now, at least not in the three tracks of theirs I've heard. What happened? I'd like to know. Perhaps Paul Sprangers grew supremely tired of being hit with the Malkmus tag and decided to sing in a totally different way. I've been thinking about this a little bit lately--the effect of criticism on an artist's development (mostly b/c of something John Banville said in this cool interview he gave for the Paris Review)--and the emergence of Free Energy as a bizarro classic rock band after the break-up of Hockey Night might be a good example of an artist's aesthetic trajectory being altered severely by the feedback he (they?) receives. I suspect, for no justifiable reason, that that third, unreleased Hockey Night album might've shown some more weirdness/individuality than is evident in the stuff that's being released in the lead-up to Free Energy's Stuck on Nothin' (or maybe not).
You can download Hockey Night's Keep Guessin here.
Posted by Kevin at 08:15 AM
July 19, 2009
Sir G.: girdle-wearing badass.
This feels like something the Green Knight would have listened to in order to get pumped up for an elective beheading. On his (green) in-helmet mp3 player. I suspect you'd have to choose your pre-decapitation music very carefully, since you'd want to get yourself psyched, but you wouldn't want to be so pumped up that you get wild and preemptively chop off the other person's noggin. Does it even matter though, if you're a magical knight and can just pick your shit up from the ground, dust it off, and ride away? This is the kind of thing I think about when I go for a long run, in a sort of exhaustion-delusion state.
[BUY]
Posted by Kevin at 08:36 PM