Oh, fuck yeah! I just scored a ticket for tomorrow night's sold-out performance of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings (at the kick-ass Bimbo's 365 Club in north beach). I just started listening to her last week and I realized that she was about to play here. Some other plans I had got post-poned, so I thought I'd try hook up a ticket. The band is pretty tight, and some reviews have gone as far as to call Sharon Jones the "female James Brown". She is pretty goddamn good.
Her latest album is 100 Days, 100 Nights, which is what I've heard so far. I will definitely be making a purchase at the gig tomorrow night. Searching around the interweb, as I tend to do, I found this pretty cool cover of Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In). Apparently, this is only available on 7" at the gigs. Check it out.
So I just read that Stuart from Belle & Sebastian got married. I don't really listen to them any longer, but I was thinking that if it were not for Belle & Sebastian, I would not have met any of peeps I've encountered in the past five or six years. I've crashed on a lot of couches, downed a lot of alcohol with, and befriended people I might have no business even knowing. The world got a lot smaller because of a little Glaswegian indie pop band.
Here's the story of how I first got into Belle & Sebastian. I was living with my girlfriend and another couple. The guy had great taste in music, but him and his girlf were pretty lame. The girl was an obnoxious nag and the guy walked around the house in his boxers and wife-beater. Gross. But he happened to have a copy of If You're Feeling Sinister, which sounded pretty good to me.
Those guys moved out and I kinda forgot about Belle & Sebastian until I stumbled across a $5 promo copy of The Boy With The Arab Strap. A few months later, they were playing two nights at the Warfield theater. I found out too late about it and of course, it was sold out. I did a search and found a B&S message board, registered and pleaded for an extra ticket. The rest, apparently, is history. Or something.
Anyways, this was the first B&S track I really, really liked.
So I was trying to find out what Andy Sturmer was up to these days. You might know him, he used to be in the criminally underrated Jellyfish, and he also wrote/produced PUFFY for a while. So yeah, I was trying to find out if he had anything goin on lately, and that was how I found L.E.O. It's the project of someone called Bleu (who sounds like he's pretty badass in his own right), and it's kind of a study or homage on the production and songwriting techniques of Jeff Lynne, who used to front the great E.L.O. Kind of a weird circle, isn't it?
Anyways, back to the task at hand, which is the L.E.O. album, entitled Alpacas Orgling. If somebody listens to this and says "OMG WHAT A RIPOFF!", I think they're missing the point. Of course, they wanted to get the sound down, but it also seems like a fun project as well. One of the articles I read (linked on the myspXXX site), Bleu states that L.E.O. stands for "little email operas". All the people who collaborated on this pretty much did their work at home and the tracks would bounce around back and forth until they were done. Pretty cool, eh?
Joe is the man. Go see the film. Know your rights. And laugh at Johnny Depp. WTF was that all about? It looked like they were interviewing Captain Jack Sparrow.
Check out this awesome track; Break-A-Way, by Irma Thomas. I love how the lyrics are so sad yet the music is very uptempo in contrast, handclaps and all. Not only that, it sounds like a completely fucked up relationship, which is my specialty. Songs like this totally live on my street. I read that Irma Thomas has a cult following, but with songs like this, that girl deserved to be a star.
So I guess I've been listening to Voxtrot for about a year or so. I climbed upon the bandwagon a little late, as usual, but what are you gonna do? Whatever, right? The point is, I like them, for the most part and I'm going to go see them next week at the excellent Bimbo's 365 Club(inconveniently located in San Francisco's North Beach district). Here comes the part where I sound like an indie snob. Voxtrot released their (self-titled) first album just earlier this year and I don't like it nearly as much as the previous EPs (Mothers Sisters Daughters & Wives, Raised By Wolves, Your Biggest Fan). I dunno, I'm sure they put a lot of hard work into the album, but something got lost in the process. The EPs feel fresh and vital, while the album feels like it's stuck in the mud or something. I wanted to like it, but it really didn't catch me at all. Give the other stuff a listen, though, it's well worth your time.
All said, they are still a fun band to see live. Plus, all the girls love Ramesh. I don't think I've ever heard one female speak ill of his looks. So you'll get a little eye candy as well, if you attend a show. Nothing wrong with that. Check out Ramesh's blog, it's well written, if infrequently updated (kinda like this page...uhh, the infrequent updates part). Listen to more tracks on their myspaXXX page, but until then, check this out.
I'm gonna go see Puffy tomorrow night, at Slim's. I am really digging their new album, Honeycreeper, it seems more immediate to me than the previous one. It took me a while to get into Splurge. I kinda miss the Andy Sturmer production on this and the last album, though. Being a big Jellyfish fan, he was the reason I had heard of Puffy. That said, I still really enjoy Puffy, and I am quite stoked to check out the gig.
My favorite song so far is Youkai Puffy, I guess it's about a monster or a ghost. It's a bit long, clocking in at just over seven minutes, but there is dialog at the beginning which lasts for about two or three minutes. I didn't like the dialog at first, but the tones of their voices crack me up. The song itself is a barn-burner and it sounds like the band is having a blast.
Check out their G*p ad above, and test drive a new track below. Also, there are more tracks available on their myspXXX page. Honeycreeper is already out in Japan, with a US release coming in 2008. How's that for vague?
It's been a while, so time for another California type song. I like American Music Club; Mark Eitzel's lyrics are filled with self-loathing and he always makes everything sound so maudlin and melancholy. He also has a sarcastic sense of humor, which comes out when he plays live. So yeah, this cover is a good fit. It's a fine rendition, no surprises and pretty straight ahead. It's an unlisted track, I believe, on their San Francisco album.
Hmmm...okay, TREAT! Put this in your Halloween bag!
Seriously, I've been addicted to this song all week. The original is on The Crow: City of Angelssoundtrack, and there's a live version on PJ Harvey's Peel Sessions 1991-2004 album. This shit cooks, and the rest of that Peel album is just as good. Check it, then go out, get your own and thank me later.
This is pretty sweet, I found it randomly over the summer, kinda forgot about it, and just rediscovered it in my inbox the other day. It's a remix of The Supremes' Where Did Our Love Go? done by someone called Quarterbar. I don't know the specifics of Quarterbar, but just check out the link and it'll probably give you an idea. There are a few other Motown remixes in this manner, this one is my favorite of the bunch. I love the original track as it is, this remix adds a new spin to it which is kinda nice. Take it around the block and see for yourself.
The Supremes > Where Did Our Love Go? (Quarterbar Redo)
I have no idea who The Twelves are, but this remix is pretty awesome. Man, Yuki is gorgeous. Pick up the Citrus album, which sports the excellent original version of this track, right over here.
And onto another soundtrack. Tonight, I was driving around running a couple errands (trying to get home before Heroesstarted), and listening to the soundtrack for Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown. Tarantino is a guy whom people either love or hate, there doesn't seem to be any middle ground. Say what you want about him, he picks out great songs for his films. He's a music nerd, pure and simple. The song I'm about to drop is Strawberry Letter 23, by The Brothers Johnson. Hell yeah! This track was the the fucking bomb way back when. I had the 7" that had the little strawberry scratch n' sniff sleeve, I played the record to death and I sniffed the sleeve so much, you'd think I was getting high off it. Awesome. You can find this on their album, Right On Time. The original version was written by a then 15 year-old Shuggie Otis, and it appears on his Freedom Flight album. I've read that it's been covered by Bonnie Raitt, which sounds like it could be the worst cover ever.
One of my favorite movies is The Royal Tenenbaums. The ending is great. Even though the movie ends with a death, it's still sort of a celebration of life and looking ahead. Van Morrison's Everyone, which plays as the film ends, pretty much embodies that feeling. It's a perfect fit and it's difficult to think of another song that would be better in this situation, just because that scene is so ingrained in my brain. It's also a little testament to director Wes Anderson, who picks some really great and fitting songs for his soundtracks. You may or may not like his movies, but his soundtracks are stellar. Despite the song appearing in the film, it's not on this soundtrack. However, you can go straight to the source and find this song on Morrison's classic album, Moondance. Check it out.
No tune spam for this post, but this is still sorta music-related. I've had this browser plugin, FoxyTunes, for a little while now. A lot of the stuff I do at work requires me to use a web browser, and FoxyTunes lets you control your media player from the browser, instead of having to flip back and forth between windows. A couple weeks ago, I accidentally clicked on the song title in the FT display and was taken to the FT homepage.
Holy shit, it's great!
You can search the artist/band you're interested in and it brings up a sweet little page of info. It collates content from Wikipedia (artist bio), Youtube (song videos), Hype Machine (mp3s), LastFM (similar artist recommendations), Pandora (similar artist radio station), Lyric Wiki (lyrics by artist/album/song), Flickr (pix), and buy links from Amazon. Whoever created this didn't have to come up with any content at all. Brilliant. So yeah, I really dig it, as you can tell. You can download the plugin for Firefox here. And if you're using IE, you can get it here. I think it's only available for Windows, at the moment. Hopefully they'll have a Mac version running soon.
Sticking with the girl groups thing, (and this is the part where I get laughed at but i don't care) I'm really annoyed with myself for missing the Go-Go's at the Independent, last week. Yeah, I love 'em. Jane Wiedlin is freaking awesome, that girl is sex on a stick. Anyways, after the Go-Go's had been broken up for something like five years, they reunited in 1990 for what was supposed to be a one-off gig, a benefit for the California Environmental Protection Act. So a friend and I drove down to Los Angeles to catch the show, and it was great. They ending up touring a little more, I saw them again a year or so later, and I also caught them in 2001 when they were touring in support of their album, God Bless The Go-Go's. How Much More, from Beauty and the Beat, is perhaps my favorite song. I always liked how most of the songs were so uptempo, but the lyrics were kinda sad. Man, look at that pic; the 80s were responsible for some really heinous fashion trends.
I bought tickets to see The Pipettes at the end of the month, they're playing at the most excellent Bimbo's 365 Club. Just last week, their album finally got a US release, so I'm guessing the US tour is supposed to coincide with that. Just a side note, if you do end up liking this, I recommend tracking down the original release on Memphis-Industries, as the US version is being distributed by the evil Interscope. Anyway, they're kinda like cotton candy (eat too much and you get sick) but they're still really fun. I got to see them a few months back at the tiny Rickshaw Stop, so I'm gonna go again. I even mass-spammed my friends in an effort to get them out there to have a good time and support the band, but I doubt any of them will go. Fuckers. Anyways, I love this song. It's great fun, and sometimes that's all you need.
Oh, fuck yeah! I just scored a ticket for tomorrow night's sold-out performance of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings (at the kick-ass Bimbo's 365 Club in north beach). I just started listening to her last week and I realized that she was about to play here. Some other plans I had got post-poned, so I thought I'd try hook up a ticket. The band is pretty tight, and some reviews have gone as far as to call Sharon Jones the "female James Brown". She is pretty goddamn good.
