- fiqsibtysr in New Single: Patrick Wolf’s “Accident and Emergency” british glamour girls
- ezpeza in New Single: Patrick Wolf’s “Accident and Emergency” blond gets fucked
- nwagukisicap in New Single: Patrick Wolf’s “Accident and Emergency” jenna jameson threesome
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
Dear Commissar:
I spent most of the morning listening to Aly & AJ.
Both albums.
But then I thought about your incredulous questioning of my music taste, such as it is, and I couldn’t help but wonder:
“Were you right? Was I wrong?
Were you weak? Was I strong?
Yeah, both of us broken,
Caught in a moment…”
And you know what?
Just like that, the chemicals reacted. And I was happy.
Sincerely,
Sam
P.S. They actually played Las Vegas today, opening for Hannah Montana, but I didn’t go see them, because a) I really do have limits, believe it or not, and anyone related to Billy Ray Cyrus is well beyond them, and b) you can’t get Hannah Montana tickets anyway, unless you have a mom who’s willing to cheat on your essay contest for you.
P.P.S. I couldn’t think of anything interesting to say about day 3 (ABBA - Alcian Blue), except that I really like Sweden, and I’m eternally grateful to Amber for pointing me in Alcian Blue’s direction.
I have a bad habit.
No, not that one. Get your minds out of the gutter, people.
Anyway, like I mentioned before, I still do almost all of my music purchasing via CDs. This means that I wind up in a lot of record shops, flipping through random stacks of music, trying to figure out if something merits a purchase. One of my favorite places to do that — especially in the late ’90s, before its long slow decline into mediocrity — was the SoundWaves on Montrose, in Houston. I was in the used section one day, when something caught my eye. It was the name of the band on the spine of the album:
I turned the album over, and looked at the track listing. To my delight, one of the songs listed was “Nanomachines are in Richard Feynman’s Bloodstream.” That was really all it took. Six bucks and fifteen minutes later, I was on my way out the door, with The Elemental Gearbot tucked under my arm.
I wish I could say this story had a happier ending. Other, similar stories have — I first got into Public Image Ltd. just because I couldn’t resist buying an album with a track on it called “Death Disco.” But this particular CD sounds kind of like The Fall suffering a severe spinal injury as a synthesizer factory explodes over their heads, but without being as interesting as that description makes it sound. (Although maybe that’s what happened to Mark E. Smith’s teeth.) It’s not bad, really, but it certainly isn’t as good, or even as weird, as a band called A Trillion Barnacle Lapse should be. If you’re gonna pick a name like that, you’d better earn it, that’s all I’m saying.
At any rate, I made it all the way from 48th Highlanders to ABBA today, but nothing else really had the same vaguely sour smell of regret as this record. It’s kind of like rancid eggnog. You can’t miss it.
Some random thoughts from the first day:
~ Most of the [unknown] tracks simply pointed out the fact that Listening to World Music, 2nd Edition is best taken in small doses. Although the Chinese men’s choir rendition of “We Workers Have Strength” is pretty awesome.
~ Everyone said that 10,000 Maniacs went downhill after Natalie Merchant left, but in point of fact, Love Among the Ruins is at least as good an album as Our Time in Eden — and, to be fair, quite a bit better than Tigerlily. Mary Ramsey is an underrated vocalist, and the band’s cover of Roxy Music’s “More Than This” is easily one of their best singles, even if I am still partial to the original. The Earth Pressed Flat is still too inconsistent though.
~ As much as I like 10,000 Maniacs — which is a lot — five albums in a row is pushing it.
~ No matter how much I enjoy “Dolphins Cry” or “Turn It Around,” 4 Strings’ Turn It Around is really only a middling pop-trance album if you sit and listen to the whole thing. Although it’s still better than any of the garbage the band put out after Vanessa van Hemert left, which I did not buy, and so didn’t have to sit through.
~ Part of the fun of doing this is the whiplash transitions that can happen from one artist to a next. I was highly entertained when the thing after Turn It Around ended was a bunch of bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace.”
Tune in tomorrow for more…
I was originally only going to run this series on my private blog, but Joie talked me into putting some version of this here. So if you don’t like it…blame her. 
I still buy CDs, but I do most of my music listening electronically nowadays, either on my computer, my iPod, or my satellite radio. I’d been putting off…and putting off and putting off…ripping the last of my CDs to iTunes, just because it takes a long time, but last night, I finally finished doing it.
As it stands now, iTunes informs me that I have 10,451 songs at my disposal, or, should I care to think about it that way, 29.2 days’ worth of music. I was thinking, as I scrolled down the list, that there are some things there that I haven’t listened to in an awfully long time.
So, in a fit of something that might be termed inspiration if you’re feeling generous, I decided that I’m going to listen to the entire list, starting at the beginning (the ones marked [unknown], which come before 10,000 Maniacs because of the brackets), and going all the way to the end (which would be Kino, who come after the Zumi-Kai Original Instrumental Group because iTunes doesn’t really know what to do with Cyrillic letters — and it’s not the only one, apparently, as our site software won’t even display them). And, because I’d really like to start writing again, I’m going to take this opportunity to post about it, for as long as it takes to finish.
Should you feel so inclined, you can also follow along on my Last.fm page, which will display all of the gory details. But I’ll be trying to post an update daily, which will amuse me, whether or not it amuses any of you ^_~
