- Doug Stephen in FOR FUCK SAKE EVERYONE KNOCK IT OFF WITH THE GOD DAMNED ACCORDIONS JESUS CHRIST Woah, okay Vice Magazine.
- Doug Stephen in Vampire Weekend - S/T I’ve never listened to a solo Paul Simon record, or to Graceland, so I don’t know about that. But the songs I’ve heard by Vampire Weekend...
- bjyhore in New Single: Patrick Wolf’s “Accident and Emergency” She had actually been robbed of it cant be cruel. Mistress. I could do. jennifer lopez porn Three.
“The World’s Greatest Music Collection” is up for auction on Ebay. While the name may be very subjective and the premise alone could spark pages of debate on blogs like… oh, I dunno… say, Superstarcastic.com, it is a pretty impressive collection of LPs and CDs (what, no cassettes or 8-tracks or Reel-to-Reels?).
On the collection’s website, current owner, Paul Mawhinney, claims that there are 3 million records (45s, 78s, EPs and LPs) and 300,000 CDs spanning all genres.
By Apple’s advertised estimations, it would take 150 160 GB iPods to store the touted 6 million songs available in this auction. That would cost you $52,350 before tax and shipping. Which is nothing really if you can afford $3 million in recorded materials. If you can hack that, you’ll be happy to know that you’ll currently be the only bidder.
When I first heard The Postal Service’s album, Give Up it rocked my world, in a snyth-poppy, not-that-rockin’ kind of way. It was totally awesome and amazing…FIVE YEARS AGO.
That’s right - today marks the five year anniversary of Sub Pop’s official release of Give Up.
Since then samples of the pretty little bleeps and blips have been (over)used in commercials selling cars, hospitals, candy, mp3 players, crappy MTV reality shows, and most recently UPS. Do the ad-men think that this is still the ticket to the hearts and wallets of the indie-yuppie demographic? Are there really people out there who aren’t as completely over it as I am? Apparently so. A quick search of my Facebook network shows that 12 of my “friends” and over 500 other people list The Postal Service as one of their favorite bands….
I am of the opinion that this is not even a real band; it’s a project. And it’s played out. I’m sure most of those people have checked out other Death Cab for Cutie music - it’s practically mom-rock these days. But how many of them listen to Dntel? James Figurine?
Five years later and this shit will not stop. It’s a phenomenon. Good for Sub Pop, and good for Ben and Jimmy. Not good for me because I have actually become sick of a record I really, really liked. It’s okay though, even if it hadn’t been embraced by the masses, I’d probably no longer be listening to this anymore. File it away as a classic and give it up.
In light of the interest I’ve seen lately in the total awesome-ness that are metal album covers, I’ve decided to compile 10 from memory and collection for the sight-thirsty public. These covers are a mix of favorites, most brutal, most metallic-ly artsy, most gruesome, etc. Enjoy.
Leviathan by Mastodon. This album rocks on its own, but the cover is unbelievable. All of Mastodon’s album art is like this, but this one just wins. It just wins.
Whoracle by In Flames. Pay attention to detail on this one; there’s so much going on. I, for one, feel rather bad for the little girl on the lower right hand side.
Deliverance by Opeth. It embodies creepy. It’s got all of the classic elements of eerie: old bed with smiling doll on it, dark lighting and lots of shadows, and some dark figure in the reflection of the mirror to the left of the clock to the left of the bed.
One Kill Wonder by The Haunted. How about that.
Versus The World by Amon Amarth. How epic is that? In the context of the picture, I don’t think it possible to be more epic.
Master of Puppets by Metallica. It’s my favorite album by them and it’s got some serious artwork. It should be in a museum.
The Great Cold Distance by Katatonia. I dig the red lighting, the shading, and the melancholy of this cover. The album emits exactly what the cover conveys. I just like it.
Metal Magic by Pantera. How cool is this cover? If southern metal would have existed in 1975, this is what a typical record sleeve would have looked like.
Reign in Blood by Slayer. The album itself has been deemed “The heaviest album of all time” by Kerrang! Magazine. Quite satanically explicit for 1986, huh?
Tomb of the Mutilated by Cannibal Corpse. Truth is, there isn’t one cover by these guys that isn’t violently grotesque and eye-popping. This one just…just…just somehow stands out in the mix. I mean, had you ever thought about a half-rotted zombie going down on another before seeing this?
So that’s that. Metal rules.
I let a friend of mine borrow this album the other day and decided to take another listen in honor of it. I forgot how disgustingly good it is.
You gotta love something so classic and Renaissance as DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man to be tampered with and exploited to fit the artistic musings of a death metal band. The “supernatural art” of this album is exactly what Anders Friden says it is. It’s above and beyond. Besides, after this album, In Flames started down the rocky, well-trodden, and shit-streaked path of mainstream. It’s still good, hell it’s still amazing…but it’s still streaked with brown. It’s much like what’s been happening since the dawn of good music. Eventually, most of it just gets corrupted and stretched to fit a wider demographic. Clayman falls in just before that. I love it.
I’m quite ill, and so I may not be writing too much for a bit. But, as I sit here in a semi-comatose stupor, you know what’s disappointing to me? No, not that when I stand up, it feels like an army of jackrabbits are hitting me in the shoulders. It’s that people in English-speaking countries (or at least the two I’ve lived in, the US and Canada — Alberta, so I won’t pretend to speak for Quebec) don’t seem to like trying foreign-language music (unless it’s “The Macarena”). Because if they did, Belanova would maybe be more popular. And then, as I shimmied around my car/bedroom/office with the glass window to the smoother-than-butter-or-Duran Duran synthpop, I would perhaps like the radio better.
Their 2007 album, Fantasia Pop made my best of the year list, and I’d strongly recommend it if you like synth-based pop music at all. I do. But you probably guessed that already.
Something that I find completely inexplicable is the “World Music” section at most CD stores.
Usually, it’s like fifty different copies of The Old Guys Hawaiian Guitar Ensemble Plays Seventy Minutes’ Worth of “Mele Kalikimaka”, some really old pan-flute albums, and maybe if you’re lucky a Putumayo sampler or two. Never, in even one of the dozens, possibly hundreds of record stores I’ve been in over the years, has it had even one Annbjørg Lien album, which is why I had to buy all three of her albums that I have (Felefeber, Baba Yaga, and Aliens Alive) online, after a friend of mine accidentally discovered one of her CDs in the public library.
This is frustrating to me, because Lien is sort of like the Jimi Hendrix of the Hardanger fiddle, if Hendrix set fewer instruments on fire, and instead made soft, emotional fireside music with a lot of drones. I’ve listened to a lot of “Nordic Contemporary” or whatever you want to call it, and Lien’s work is easily the best and, in its quiet way, most virtuosic, that I’ve heard. Heck, Felefeber made my top 10 albums list back in 2006. I’m sure she’s less obscure in Norway, but she certainly ought to be as famous stateside as, say, Yanni. I’m positive she could put on a better PBS special than him. And she’d look less like Captain Hook.
Note: Day 5 was Annbjørg Lien to Anton Bruckner
