Fifty-Two Tuesdays

Intro: Hey, did you hear the one about the deaf trombone player?  .  .  .   Yeah, neither has he.

Listening: Well, I finally managed to break, at least temporarily, my Silversun Pickups addiction.  It required a potent cocktail of the new Killers album, the latest Luomo album, and several listens through The Shondes’ The Red Sea.

Now I talked about the Killers album last week, and it’s just grown on me since.  But the surprise find of the week was this band Luomo.  Maybe it’s just me, but until I ran across a tweet on Jeph Jacques’ twitter feed about their album Convivial.  He mentioned that it’s a blend of good modern techno and vocal house, both things of which I am a fan, so I figure I’d give it a try.  I liked the samples I found online, so I grabbed a copy over at Amazon.  And, well, Jeph’s description is apt: the album blends the bend of light, chirpy techno with classic-sounding, vocalled trance tunes.  I’m especially a fan of the track “Love You All” which features legato vocals over a busy, syncopated beat and makes great use of breaks.

Another tune I’m particularly fond of is “Slow Dying Places”, which starts of with a laid-back, bass-centric sound that wouldn’t be out of place on an old Thievery Corporation album.  It slowly builds, adding faster and more percussive layers, until it’s morphed into a great upper-mid-tempo dance track.  The production and crafting on this tune are particularly masterful.  A lot of layers very different layers all blend together to make a tune that’s as intricate as it is energetic.

The whole album is full of well-crafted trance tunes and is well worth a listen for any fan of trance, techno, or other forms of electronic dance music.

I also recently got around to putting The Red Sea back in my car CD player.  I know I’ve squeed about this album at length in this space, but seriously: if you don’t have a copy, by all means GET ONE.  Easily one of the best rock albums of the year.  (Which is kind of impressive, since it came out the second week of January.)

Upcoming: Wow, yeah, I gotta be honest folks, there’s nothing between now and the end of the year that I’m really all that excited about.  I think everything that might be interesting got a mention last week.  I mean, hell, word has it that even the new Busta Rhymes album is being delayed until after New Years.

Please tell me I’m missing something?  There has to be something good coming out this month.

Thinking: Okay, so I finally got an .mp3 player for my recent trip to DC (I know, I know, I’m the last person on the planet to have one.)  And I knew that once I finally got around to getting one, I’d definitely make good use of it.  But I never realized just how much use it would see.  It goes to work with me every day, and when I’m not listening to it at work, it’s in my bag right next to whatever book I’ve chucked in there for reading material.  And I wind up listening to it a lot.

Which makes me REALLY regret getting the cheapo, $30 2GB, off-brand player.  (Which, by the way, has a shitty little speaker in it.  Which is turned on by default.  That, plus nice headphones, meant that I annoyed the shit out of everyone in earshot the first time I turned it on, because the crappy little speaker was blaring away and I couldn’t tell, because it was playing through my headphones as well.  That wouldn’t have been so embarrassing, but the first time I turned it on was on a crowded airplane.  Thanks, Onyx, your .mp3 player won me the “Douchiest Passenger on the Plane” award!)

So basically, now that I’ve got an .mp3 player, I need a new .mp3 player.  Any suggestions on what to get?  Should I just forget comparison shopping and get an iPod, or are their better deals out there?  I don’t need a huge amount of space, nor does it have to be tiny.  (In fact, large would be preferable.  I have big Polish ditch-diggin’ hands, so a bigger interface wouldn’t be a bad thing.)  Also, I’m clumsy, so if they make ruggedized .mp3 players, that might be a good place for me to start looking.

Well lazyweb?  What’s the right .mp3 player for me?

News: Okay, so the big news of course is that Coldplay are dirty, filthy plagiarists, according to Joe Satriani.  Of course, according to Coldplay, they’re not at all.  It’s looking increasingly like the courts will get to decide.

Here’s Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida”:

And here’s Satriani’s “If I Could Fly”:

Personally?  It kind of sounds like Coldplay should have called their track “Viva La Vida (Joe Satriani Cover w/ Lyrics and None of the Bitchin’ Solos)”.  ‘Course the parenthetical part of the title makes the title kind of awkward, but hey.  Better an unwieldy track title then losing all their album profits in court . . .  What do you folks think?

In other news, Damon Albarn’s massive ego, along with his vacant, smug stare and pasty, spindly body will be reuniting with the other three guys who were in Blur to do a tour.  Er, I’m sorry, did I say tour?  At the moment all they’ve really announced is that they’ll be doing one show, in Hyde park.  Tickets go on sale later this week for the show, which is in July.  I feel this is a bit pessimistic, because the odds of a Blur reuinion show taking longer than a few hours to sell out are slim.

Song of the Week: Okay, so to make up for all those mean things I said about Damon Albarn, here’s Blur performing “End of a Century”, from their The Best Of DVD:

P. S.: Props to Parlophone for allowing embedding of the videos on their official YouTube channel.