Category Archives: Music

December(ists) in March

The Hazards of LoveI’m having a serious Decemberists fest this week, having just purchased their new song cycle/rock opera/concept album/tour de force, The Hazards of Love, a week early thanks to iTunes. On Tuesday I debated buying it now or waiting for the CD, and now I can’t imagine not having bought it.

It’s one of those albums that just seems so perfect, so essential, that I already can’t imagine the musical world without it, and I can scarcely even imagine wanting to listen to anything else. The last time I felt this way about an album was… well, let’s see: when I first heard The Decemberists’ last album, The Crane Wife. (And I even have documented evidence to prove it.)

Well, I loved The Crane Wife, but The Hazards of Love blows it out of the water. If The Crane Wife was the best album since OK Computer, then Hazards has to be the best album since… oh, I don’t know, let’s go for the obvious comparison: The Dark Side of the Moon. I’m not sure if, in this era, an album can possibly leave the kind of indelible impression on our musical culture that Pink Floyd’s masterpiece did in 1973, but you can’t fault The Decemberists for being born a generation too late.

The band performed the new album in its entirety on Wednesday night at SXSW, and it was broadcast live on a handful of NPR stations around the country, including The Current here in Minneapolis. I didn’t get to hear it live, but no matter — you can download the whole thing for free on the All Songs Considered podcast.

Listening to the live version, two things struck me: one specific moment and one general observation. The specific moment is some d-bag in the audience, in the middle of the show, calling for “Valerie Plame.” Sure, that’s a great song, but they’re right in the middle of a freakin’ song cycle, idiot! The general observation: the band’s prog-loving keyboardist, Jenny Conlee, cranked the synths to 11 in concert. Sweet.

Rolling Stone album reviewers are idiots

Rolling StoneYeah, I know. Big news. But I was just reminded of it again.

I was listening to one of my favorite new albums, Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future by The Bird and the Bee. In particular, I was listening to the song “Witch,” a song that is extremely evocative of the music of classic James Bond movies (and not just because I’ve been watching Moonraker on my iPhone over the past couple of nights). So I decided to google “The Bird and the Bee” Witch “James Bond” to see if anyone had discussed this correlation.

The first result back was the Rolling Stone review of the album, which I was disappointed to see had only received a 2-star rating. The review is scornfully dismissive of the blatant influence of Burt Bacharach, bossa nova and the Bee Gees. So imagine my surprise when I read Rolling Stone’s 3-and-a-half-star review of their first album, which mentioned, in a far more appreciative tone, the blatant influence of Burt Bacharach, bossa nova and the Beach Boys.

Granted, the Beach Boys are probably a more enduringly worthy influence than the Bee Gees. But I happen to really like “How Deep Is Your Love” (which The Bird and the Bee covered on an EP a couple years ago and which, I have read, but I hasten to note I would not know from personal experience, was also included in the Sex and the City movie soundtrack), and I doubt that the influence of the Beach Boys vs. the influence of the Bee Gees would, on its own, make a star-and-a-half difference in the quality of the two albums.

I have not actually heard The Bird and the Bee’s first album (yet), but if their second is only a 2-star effort, then the first must be a 3-and-a-half-star masterpiece beyond anything in the known world of music.

The real problem here is that musical tastes are highly subjective, even among music reviewers who work for the same publication. But although the reviewers in Rolling Stone get a byline, RS still presents a monolithic face as the voice of popular music criticism, and as such it would be nice if they could maintain a little continuity in their treatment of individual artists from one album to the next, at least to the extent that the star ratings should not be applied as subjectively as the commentary within the reviews themselves… or, the star ratings should never be presented out of context without noting the name of the reviewer who assigned an album its rating.

For example:
Rolling Stone reviews, accordingly amended

I’m scrobbling

Last.fmWhat is scrobbling, you ask? Here’s your answer.

Now this probably seems like exactly the kind of privacy invasion that would make me totally paranoid, and you’re right. I’ve known about Last.fm for years, but I’ve avoided it like the plague, mainly because I was afraid it was either a trick by the RIAA to collect data on music pirates (which I shouldn’t really worry about, because 99% of my music is legit, and I don’t use P2P networks) or it was spyware.

Well, OK, it is spyware in a sense, I suppose, but I realize now that it’s a bit different if you know you’re being spied on, and you have total control over what the spy can see.

Mainly, I have wanted for ages to have a way to automatically display on my website what music I’ve been listening to, and with Last.fm’s scrobbling, and an RSS feed, it is now possible. So you will note that in the right column on all of my pages, in addition to my Twitter feed, I now also have “What I’m Listening To.” Dangling participles aside, it’s exactly what I had been hoping for.

I also have all of my recent (original) music up on Last.fm, including free downloads. Check it out!

And finally, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge Last.fm for WordPress, the excellent WordPress plugin I’m using for the feat of syndication you see on these pages. I futzed for an hour or so last night with various RSS feed plugins for WordPress, was disappointed with them all, and then I decided to just check and see if someone had written a plugin for this specific purpose. This plugin is fantastic — it does exactly what I wanted, and is a complete no-brainer to set up. Nice!