I keep forgetting to post about the new mono collection in stores now (today, in fact), titled Gone. The album includes tracks from the very rare debut Hey You EP, as well as material from various vinyl and split EP releases. The band is also releasing a DVD documenting their overseas tours, titled The Sky Remains the Same As Ever. It’ll be available in the US in early 2008, according to the band’s website, and it’s already available in Japan. When the band tours the US this fall, they’ll be selling copies at their shows.
Bounce.com also reports envy releases a new album on Nov. 17, titled transfovista. Like mono, the band also releases a DVD on the same day, titled abyssal. The DVD follows the band on its US tour and includes some promo videos as well. No US release date was specified for neither the album nor DVD.
Do not assume you will be adventurous with your music tastes forever. Ten to twenty years from now, the bands you love today will be recycled by so-called new bands, and you too will voice the refrain, "I liked it better the first time around."
I thought I would welcome an ’80s revival. I thought it would be nice to see bands I grew up with exert influence on bands coming up. I was wrong. I liked Franz Ferdinand better when they were called Gang of Four. The title of Duran Duran’s 2004 album was supposed to be Astronaut, not Hot Fuss.
So thank your dieties for Voxtrot — a band that sounds like the ’80s without having to rip off the decade wholesale.
I’ve been meaning to write about Jayne Cortez & the Firespitters for a long time, but I don’t think writing about this album would do as much justice as listening it. Cheerful & Optimistic is one of those acquisitions that just stick out in my collection. It’s not Japanese pop, it’s not indie rock, it’s not from the ’80s — it might be close to downtown New York stuff, but that’s a stretch. When I play this album in front of my family, they get annoyed by the repetition of Cortez’s verse. To my ears, it’s just musical punctuation.
I think there’s one Firespitters album available on CD Baby, but if you want to find her other works, good luck — I had to order mine through a magazine called Cadence. The difficulty of finding her albums pretty much discourages me from trying it again. Even her poetry is hard to find.
Cortez did record an album for her ex-husband Ornette Coleman’s label, Harmolodic, back in 1996, but that album is long out of print.
Some notes:
I finally learned about harmolodics about a year after I encountered Jayne Cortez through an interview with Coleman in Pulse! magazine.
It’s kind of weird for me to describe how “dark and chaotic” “War Devoted to War” gets when I don’t actually excerpt the part that gets dark and chaotic.
Yeah in retrospect, I’m not sure how African instruments and social consciousness really relate.
I debated whether to post a review of the film Once here or over at my entirely neglected film review site, Filmwhore.org. I decided to post it there because that site so badly needs new content. As a result, everything I wanted to say about the soundtrack is over there.
If you haven’t heard of Once, it’s an Irish film starring the lead singer of the Frames, Glen Hansard. The band’s former bassist, John Carney, wrote and directed it. It opened in May 2007 with a limited run, and since then, it’s opened in more theaters. Fox Searchlight gave Once another marketing push, and there’s even a campaign to get the songs some Oscar nods.
If it’s playing in your town, I really recommend you see it.
I’ve compared Levi Kreis to Onitsuka Chihiro numerous times, but like any such comparison, it’s not exact.
Kreis makes his R&B influences plainly known, while Onitsuka draws more from the Carole King school of balladry. When either artist cuts loose from the confines of the piano ballad, the results are strikingly different.
But within the context of the piano, their similarities are more perceptual than musical. In plainspeak, I don’t usually like this kind of stuff, but I like it far more when they play it.
Kreis’ first album, One of the Ones, is pretty much him and the piano. For such limited instrumentation, the album is incredibly expressive.
Boom Boom Satellites releases its new album on Nov. 21, so says Bounce.com. The album is not yet titled, but it’s expected to include the singles "Easy Action" and "What Goes Around Comes Around". "Easy Action" is used as the theme song for the film Vexile, while "What Goes Around Comes Around" was featured in a commercial for Dodge. A limited edition first pressing includes a DVD with promo clips and a history of the band.
Yorico releases a new single on Nov. 14 titled "Kokoro no Kagi", so says Bounce.com. The title track is used as the opening theme for the TV Asashi Drama Shikeshou Embalmer Mamiya Shinjuurou, and a cover of Cyndi Lauper’s "Time After Time" serves a coupling track. Yorico took a break shortly after the release of her second album, second VERSE, for health reasons. The single is first release in a year and 9 months.
Cocco releases a new single titled "Dugong no Mieru Oka" on Sept. 15, but the release is restricted to Okinawa, so says Bounce.com. Cocco performed the song during her Live Earth appearance on July 7. The dugong is a sea mammal closely related to the manatee, and it’s an animal for which Cocco reportedly has an affinity.
Podcasting veteran Ryan suggested I create a separate feed and a dedicated page for the podcast. The former was already in place for the inaugural show, and I waited till it was up to publicize the URL.
I debated whether to spin the podcast off to its own site with at least its own subdomain. I was too lazy to create that setup, and the podcast itself isn’t very big. For a five-minute show that "broadcasts" in 8- to 10-episode seasons, an entire site seems a bit much. Instead, I’m offering a shortcut to the podcast category page:
When I reviewed NUMBER GIRL’s SCHOOL GIRL DISTORTIONAL ADDICT, I was only starting to cover Japanese music, and I had not yet taken any refresher courses in Japanese. So the resulting review was pretty spotty. This series and season premiere episode of the Musicwhore.org Podcast is my attempt to give that review a few more dimensions. I wonder sometimes whether my early coverage of NUMBER GIRL got people on this side of the Pacific Ocean interested in the band. I’d like to think the old site was one of the first to provide detailed information about the group. By the way, I’m reading off of scripts for the entire run of this podcast. I don’t do well with the extemporaneous speaking, and it’s easier to edit after recording. Also, I put the podcast through a lot of effects — mostly compression and limiting — so it’s probably best to listen to it at 50%-75% volume. It sounds OK at maximum, but it’s better when it’s not too loud. Some notes:
Actually, Mukai Shuutoku name-checks Galaxie 500 in “Pixie Dü”, although the title is an obvious shoutout to the Pixies and Hüsker Dü.
Toshiba-EMI is now known as EMI Japan. At the time I wrote the script for this show, the name change hadn’t happened.
I put a gate to filter out some of the high-frequency ambient noise — my inhalations and other such noises — but I don’t think I set the cut-off frequency low enough to catch everything. So it might sound a bit strange in places.