Go buy the new Dessa album right now. Seriously.

January 19, 2010


Yeah, I already posted some YouTube music recently, but it’s rare that a song can drive me to buy an entire album. Instantly. I mean, as instantly as possible, given the album wasn’t for sale until today, and I first saw this video on Sunday, and, you know, it doesn’t really matter. All I’m saying is that those songs are rare.

Dessa’s “Dixon’s Girl” is one of those songs. Kind-of-I-mean-absolutely-fantastic talent right there, straight out of MPLS and Doomtree.

And if you don’t watch this and immediately buy the album, I have to question your taste.

Don’t take that chance. I SWEAR I’LL DO IT.

(Oh yeah, thanks to Brian Bieber for tipping me off to the video, and, in turn, to the new album.)

Tags: Music, Random YouTube |

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At The Drive-In

January 16, 2010


A few of us were wondering why, of all bands, we hadn’t yet scoured YouTube for some classic At The Drive-In shows.

We had no good answer. We had utterly failed as Internet users.

Until now.

Enjoy.

Tags: Music, Random YouTube |

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BMOWP’s Favorite Album of the Decade

December 28, 2009


The Moon and AntarcticaOh, come on. Let’s be honest. You don’t want to read another list. You’re absolutely ecstatic that I chose only one album.

That’s good. I’ve skipped a lot of them this year, understanding that everyone’s “best of the year” or “best of the decade” collections are created through the ether of personal taste. One person’s Kid A is another person’s “How can you choose Kid A as the best album of the decade when it’s barely Radiohead’s third best record overall?”

I was about to enter the fray, actually. My ten favorite albums of the decade:

#1 – Modest Mouse, Moon and Antarctica
#2 – Er… Um…

Well, there was a problem.

Call it a shift in execution. This was the decade in which I started listening to songs instead of albums. My personal trends were driven by college radio and the Internet instead of touring punk bands and my friends’ CD players. My tastes expanded to the point that I could no longer devote enough attention to specifics, looking for the quick fix over the long play.

Which is not to say that I completely forgot the album format. Jets to Brazil, Arcade Fire, Wilco, The Strokes and The White Stripes all threw out great albums that I listened to as a whole. Some of my favorite bands released albums that I certainly paid attention to: bands like Built to Spill and Hot Water Music put forth a great effort, but nothing compared to the albums they released in the 90s. Even recently, MGMT and The Antlers alerted me to defining music that, given another ten years, could rival the albums I’ve already deified.

For me, there’s only one album that stood strong enough for the entire ten years. And it was all rooted in a time and a situation: the summer of 2000. It was a trip to England. It was a realization of whatever I thought my talents would become. It was my first year out of the dorms thanks to a year in limbo and a year as an RA.

And while Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica works well both as a collection of spacey, intense songs and as a concept album on the meaning of life, it never would have become quite the life-altering force without the situation in which it played a part: the soundtrack to a generational change, from grown-up child to aspiring adult.

The top 10 list wilted, a strong top album unsupported by the willing (though not necessarily able) albums below it. Paired up against #1, no album really stood a chance.

I guess I knew that from the beginning.

Tags: Music, The Top..., Vilhauer |

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Canon

September 15, 2009


September 9th, 2009 came and went with a flurry of writing and boasting of the new Beatles remasterings. I fancy myself a Beatles fan – I go through stages every few years when I listen to nothing but The Beatles. In fact, I’m in one of those stages right now, since Sierra won’t listen to anything but a combination of “Yellow Submarine,” “Here Comes the Sun,” and “Help!”

Through it all, I’ve wholly ignored the early albums, and I’ve never really considered the entire catalog as a whole. These remasters have forced me do that, and for that reason I am in the middle of a grand experiment.

I’ve taken the 209 songs of the traditional Beatles canon, thrown them together in chronological order and am listening to them. Right now. All 9.5 hours. In a row.

(To do this, I took the two discs of Past Masters and reorganized them based on their British release. The same went for the five singles that finish off Magical Mystery Tour. I used this site as my guide.)

If you’re counting and you come up with more than 209, here’s why: I skipped doubles (no alternate version of “Get Back,” “Let it Be” or “Love Me Do”) and I skipped Yellow Submarine, because that album sucks.

Music is so often taken one piece at a time that we rarely see the full picture of a band’s career. Even greatest hits collections are jumbled affairs, mostly missing the mark on continuity and growth despite the appearance of major hits. To listen to everything in the order it was released is to create a sonic timeline, one that – when captured all at once – can show the immense amount of growth, stagnation and dynamic change every band goes through, whether it’s some random garage band or The Beatles.

I found a great benefit in reading John Updike’s Rabbit novels in order, back to back. Not only was I able to grab more of the continuity (thanks to the previous novel being so fresh in my mind) but I was also exposed to Rabbit’s entire life at once. Four books, one life.

The Beatles recorded everything in their collection in a short seven years. I’m running through it all in nine hours.

That’s what I’m doing today. Carry on.

Tags: Music |

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5, 10, 15, 20…

August 13, 2009


I’ve love the new 5, 10, 15, 20 columns from Pitchfork, wherein some pseudo-famous indie rocker details the albums that made his or her life what it is at each five-year-increment.

So I’m stealing it.

A word to the wise – I’ve cheated. But for good reason. Often, you’ll see two – or even three – albums. Chalk it up to a wildly changing focus on genres. I’ve passed through several different phases, and these phases all seem to peak a few years AFTER the five-year-interval. In fact, ages 10, 15 and 20 served more as a crossroads between phases, where two genres mixed.

Let’s go.

Age 5
USA For Africa: “We Are The World”

Outside of The Monkees and various cartoon theme songs, I’m sure I was uninitiated in the ways of music back in 1984. Of course, I don’t remember. I was only five.

I do vividly remember my father requesting “Happy Birthday” by the Beatles on the radio for my sixth or seventh birthday, and I remember Phil Collins’ “Mama” and “That’s All” playing a lot, but “We Are the World” probably served as my initiation.

It was the first time I actually wanted to be part of a song – to be one of the singers. I used to imagine my stuffed animals and toys singing a benefit song together. Because I apparently didn’t have many friends.

Age 10
“Weird” Al Yankovic: UHF
Motley Crue: Dr. Feelgood

Speaking of no friends, I was utterly devoted to “Weird” Al Yankovic when I was 10. Naturally – he was the soundtrack to the lives of many future dorks, and I was no different.

However, this is also the age when I branched out a bit, so giving the entire year to “Weird” Al is a little deceiving. It’s funny to think that this was the year that produced Paul’s Boutique, Doolittle and Bleach, but my unpracticed ear was drawn to the blossoming hair metal scene, thanks in part to a cassette purchase of Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood.

Age 15
Metallica: Live Shit: Binge and Purge
Green Day: Dookie

Hair metal really took hold of my attention when Poison’s live album – Swallow This Live (1991) – came out, and I then focused primarily on safe, radio-friendly rock bands: Poison, Motley Crue, Warrant, Ugly Kid Joe, Van Halen. Boring. Predictable. Awful, now that I look back.

And then, ramping up to age 15 – and my first days in high school – something else happened: Metallica. Metal got serious, and the Metallica juggernaught culminated with their first live box set, Live Shit: Binge and Purge. I had never been so excited for a musical project in my entire life. Come to think of it, I probably never have been since, and may never again. It allowed my love for Metallica to coast on for several more years, even after they got all shitty and cut their hair.

Of course, this was the time I became more interested in both alternative music and a renewed era in pop punk. This is the year Kurt Cobain died, the year Ill Communication and The Downward Spiral and Weezer’s debut album were released. So R.E.M. and Nine Inch Nails and whatever else was considered “left of center” at the time became awesome in my mind. Green Day’s Dookie gets the nod for pointing me in the future direction of Bad Religion and NOFX.

Age 20
Braid: Frame and Canvas
The Get Up Kids: Red Letter Day EP
Hot Water Music: Forever and Counting

We skip Sunny Day Real Estate, Texas is the Reason, Sense Field and the rest of the Revelation Records/Post-punk emo-ness that led me to want to be in a band and sing warbled whining about tortured teenage angst, and we go right to the tail end of that movement – my sophomore year in college, spanned across two cities, when Hot Water Music and Braid and The Get Up Kids fueled a period of manic inter-state concert attendance.

This was the year I learned how to drink, and it was the year that led me to my final genre change – from that warbly emo kid to the sophisticated indie rock aficionado, or, at least, an aficionado-in-training.

Age 25
Modest Mouse: Moon and Antarctica

I had graduated college and moved back to Sioux Falls and gotten married and had a dog and two jobs I hated and was a very busy person in general.

And in the two years between moving from St. Cloud (November 2002) and signing up for Sirius Satellite Radio (December 2004) I nearly completely forgot about music. I didn’t listen to anything new. I didn’t pay attention to the scene, didn’t go to many shows, and hardly purchased CDs.

I was stuck, just like those aging rock fans who still cling to their Journey and Tesla albums. Except I was clinging to northwest indie – Modest Mouse, Built to Spill. Foremost was The Moon and Antarctica, an album I still love to this day.

(Sirius saved me, though – specifically Sirius 26: Left of Center.)

Age 30
Ween: Chocolate and Cheese

This is me right now. According to last.fm, Modest Mouse holds the top six spots in terms of most listened to albums (not counting those I use as “concentration music,” which often loop over and over again in the background: jazz, Thom Yorke, Sigur Ros). Ugly Cassanova – an Isaac Brock spin-off – sits at #7.

But to claim Modest Mouse again would be boring. And not fair to the rest of the stuff I listen to. Now, for better or worse, my tastes have branched and become so varied that I no longer have favorite bands or albums, and my reliance on Modest Mouse and Built to Spill as easy fallback choices is probably a remnant from my lost days of music. Age 25. See above.

Now, I could easily claim MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular, or Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, or Okkervil River’s The Stand-Ins. Hell, even Girl Talk could stand a chance to land #1. (Ben Folds’ Songs for Silverman – an older one – should also be mentioned.)

But despite the wide array of choices, one album did take a higher stage: Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese, the album on which I wrote a book proposal to Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, and the album that allowed Ween to creep into the upper echelon of my listening habits.

Tags: Music, The Top..., Vilhauer |

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Here comes the sun

July 25, 2009


A week or so ago, after an extended period of grey skies, the sun appeared through the clouds - an event that prompted Kerrie to sing a line or two of The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.”

Sierra picked up on this instantly.

“Here come the sun?” she asked later. “Here come the sun?” So we pulled the song up on the iPod and introduced her to the original.

She was thrilled.

Enough that it has quickly become her favorite song. As in, the only song she’ll listen to. As in, the only song she’ll even consider, and only on repeat, and only 15 times in a row.

When she sees the sun. Any sun - in real life or in a book: “Here come the sun?”

When she sees our iPods: “Here come the sun?”

When she sees the computer, where she knows the song has been played: “Here come the sun?”

It’s all quite adorable. But it’s also quite tiring. After all, how many times can a person hear “Here Comes the Sun” without wishing that the sun would just go away, already, we’re doing fine without your light and warmth, thank you very much.

At least we know that, like her dad, she’s totally into the George Harrison songs.

Tags: Music, Sierra |

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BMOWP Classic Album – Master of Puppets

April 25, 2009


Master of PuppetsMaster of Puppets by Metallica

I was 14 when Super Mario Kart was released for Super Nintendo. Despite months of religiously dedicating my life to Final Fantasy II, as any geeky fanboy wanna-be did during the first few years of the Super Nintendo, I took time out to try the game out.

It probably goes without saying I was hooked. Most people were. For the rest of the year, there was only one game in my system – Super Mario Kart. We all became experts. We all mapped multi-player strategy in our heads at night, when the console was turned off.

This isn’t about Super Mario Kart, but it might as well be. Because during that time, my love for something else was just reaching its apex. Metallica. Kings of thrash metal, and emerging monsters of rock.

1994 was three years after the release of Metallica. It was two years after my father and I had seen them live at the Arena. It was a year after fully accepting and devouring the entire Metallica canon – at that time, five albums and a cover EP.

You have to picture me at that time: awkward, tall and scrawny, with unmanageable tight curly hair. T-shirts and jeans that were often too short. A cautious self-esteem that wasn’t dangerously low but threatened at times to dip below normal – or, however normal self-esteem can be in middle school, where every kid is desperately searching their life for meaning and popularity and the niche that they will eventually ride out for the four years of high school.

I was the least likely Metallica fan in the world. I wasn’t like my friend Eric, who kept his thin blonde hair long, wore metal shirts and played football, giving him a seeming toughness that befit the strong nature of thrash. I was, instead, an outcast. No leather, just a Chicago Bulls Starter jacket. No ripped jeans, just shorts with socks.

But somehow, I made it there. It started when my dad purchased Metallica on CD. It continued with that Arena show, during the two-and-a-half year Wherever We May Roam tour. It sprouted into something real when I bought …And Justice for All on cassette and discovered the complexity and thoughtfulness I thought lacking from most metal groups.

Everything steamrolled, really. The five albums became a constant playlist of middle-school angst. Metallica didn’t rock out about ladies or mythical demons or any of that – they laid out blistering diatribes on war and society and politics and, occasionally, metal itself. …And Justice for All has always been my favorite – after all, it was the first Metallica album that really clicked.

But it’s Master of Puppets that’s by far the best. And it always comes back to Super Mario Kart.

As far as memories go, it’s forever paired with the game, their points of reference intertwining – the game just months old; the album, several years – combining into some kind of two-headed monster (see what I did there?) that encompassed every thought. Every emotion. I rarely played the game without Master of Puppets in the background. It was the soundtrack of the year, the game serving as an effective stage for escape from whatever it was life was supposed to be like in middle school.

When I hear “Disposable Heroes,” its anti-war message still resonating today, I think first of a red turtle shell seeking out the first place Kart. When I hear “Master of Puppets,” I can still rattle off the solo like it was part of my DNA, but its lasting image is a banana peel in the middle of the road.

It’s no doubt that, when I dreamed of being the frontman of some heavy metal cover band, that I wanted our name to be Damage Inc.

Today, after years of mediocre Metallica albums, I am reminded of what Metallica really was – and is again – by their newest album, Death Magnetic. I remember that discovering Metallica was a movement in my life – a personal shift from safe and easy to that which still drives me today: creativity, complication and mastery of craft.

Yeah, it’s just metal. But I have no shame in being a Metallica fan anymore. Just as I didn’t back in 1994, when my life revolved around two things: a video game and an eight-year old album. It’s just that now, I can put things into perspective, understanding that it wasn’t the video game that made the album so fantastic.

It was the album itself that made life seem so different.

Tags: Music, Vilhauer |

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