Music

I’ve heard/seen the Swell Season’s Tiny Desk Concert so many times the songs feel like old favourites. Songs from their upcoming Strict Joy album (I like “Back Broke”, in particular), plus an encore version of “When Your Mind’s Made Up”. Lovely stuff, as always.

Okkervil River’s “Plus Ones” came into my iPod via the All Songs Considered podcast, and immediately ratcheted up Okkervil in my esteem. I own and listen to Black Sheep Boy, Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See, and Down the River of Golden Dreams, but nothing on any of those albums seemed as lyrically clever as “Plus Ones”, which takes as its central conceit the idea of adding one to various songs with numbers in their titles (“96 Tears”, “99 Luftballoons”, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” etc.). Will Sheff also manages to throw in more than a few other references - “Dry Your Eyes”, “All Out of Love” (um, at least I’m guessing he meant to reference Air Supply), “What’s New Pussycat”, “Let’s Get Lost” etc.

Managed to finagle a solitary Death Cab for Cutie concert ticket, but I’m quite happy to go to concerts solo - a legacy, perhaps, of days where I reviewed concerts for the school paper. And it was worth it. To be honest, I was always a bigger Postal Service fan than a Death Cab one, if we’re looking at the Ben Gibbard oeuvre. But Death Cab are a surprisingly muscular band live than they sound on their albums (or it could be that, as Adrianna was telling me, Narrow Stairs, which I’ve not had a chance to listen to enough of, is a much different sounding album).

I strongly recommend listening to the NPR recording of the Urban Verbs reunion. If only for the part in the middle where, 30 years later, Roddy Frantz (at least, I think it’s Frantz) still clearly is bitter about Tom Carson’s savage review of their album in Rolling Stone, and how that destroyed their career. It’s hard to believe any one media outlet would have such an impact these days in music. Even Pitchfork…

The new Fabric podcast is pretty wonderful - not just the music of a night out in Fabric, but also a eclectic, record-bin-trawling selection. Like “The Hippie and the Skinhead”, the song from the Peter Wyngarde album that Craig Richards chose to dig out. Truly bizarre. I only wish they had a proper track listing. But then maybe that might make it too easy for us crate diggers…

According to this CNN interview (and probably old news, but I haven’t been as au courant with the celeb news as I’d like), Scarlett Johansson has an album of Tom Waits covers coming out:

Just caught the Arcade Fire live at the United Palace Theatre up in Washington Heights in New York. Incredible show. Especially the one-two punch of “Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)” and “Rebellion (Lies)” that closed out the main show before the encore. “Rebellion (Lies)” is amazing to hear live - the build up, and then the release, with the whole crowd screaming. Seemed that the Funeral songs were better concert songs, although maybe that was just because the crowd were more familiar with them. “Antichrist Television Blues” was outstanding - have to say though, it does sound like Springsteen - and the spare version of “Neon Bible” I thought played well in the converted church…

I have to say, I admit I like Alanis Morissette, but “Ironic” was a crime for any right-minded snob about English, since none of it was really ironic was it?

One thing I’ve discovered about the iPod, it really does help me discover the songs that’ve been buried in the depths of my collection, brought them to light. I was sceptical about that effect - after all, I do have all the songs already on my computer - but I suppose having 40GB of music around you is very different from carrying 1GB as I used to do.