Vinylcast

From Pitchfork, which has a better description than Relapse Records has:

The set comes in a foil-stamped black box and features Mastodon’s entire recorded catalog spread over nine LPs, from the Lifesblood EP to 2006′s Blood Mountain. This includes their covers of Metallica’s “Orion”, Thin Lizzy’s “Emerald”, and Melvins’ “The Bit”, plus an exclusive live record of their performance at the Relapse Contamination Festival in 2003.

Also exclusive to the package: an embroidered patch with the band’s logo, a vinyl sticker set, and a custom Mastodon turntable mat. The box set is limited to a run of 1,000, so start Black Friday early if you want to guarantee that you get one.

Well, this looks completely badass, and they started selling the limited run just a few days ago, so run and rack up some credit bills and grab this truely legendary release.  Here’s a link, grab it while you can.

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Boston’s first album arrives on Ebay (Here’s the Link) for the astounding price of 50.00.  I am experienced at thrift store vinyl diving, and over the years I’ve picked up probably 15 of these albums.  There’s no need to charge 50.00 for this album, because when stacked up to other “most found” records at the used record store bin, it comes in at a close second to The Flying Burrito Brothers.

This album was epic, and has to be one of the only albums I know of, off hand, which every single song on the album got (and still gets) commercial rock radio airplay.  I wore the album completely through on cassette tape.  I still don’t throw them away when I buy them at the thrift stores, I save them and give them away to friends slowly over time.  It’s always nice to have a few extra records in your collection to give away to friends, there’s no better gift than a big piece of vinyl, just as much as it was really cool in the 1970s.

Vinyl is a gift that is a treasure for a lifetime.  There is no plastic CD case to break, no CD plastic to scratch, no “importing” to your computer with a button.  To import the music to your computer you have to interact with the vinyl, almost remaster the original again.  Sometimes, if you’re halfway decent at recording, your remaster is much better and more dynamic than the CD master.

Anyway, don’t buy the first three Boston albums on Ebay, visit a thrift store, or ask a friend.

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Someone is selling an Iron Maiden Piece of Mind album, (Here’s the link) signed by Adrian Smith, Steve Harris, Nicko McBrain and Dave Murray recently while on “Back Somewhere in Time Tour”, for a buy-it-now price of $250.00. I just don’t know why someone would give away their album, signed by the artists. I just don’t think I’d give mine away. It looks like, since he included the pictures of the actual signing events, he found the artists wandering the streets of New York or something. Piece of Mind was the first album featuring Nicko McBrain.

This must be one of those signings that someone did for the sole purpose of money. It makes me think of ivory. You know, ivory is illegal because it’s so cool, and because something has to die to get it. Well, it’s sort of the same thing, I mean if he were truly a fan, he wouldn’t be selling this, therefore he probably went and got the signatures for the sole purpose of making more money from a single album. That should make it worthless in the same vain as ivory. If I bought the album, not getting the signatures myself, or even knowing who did, not even a chain of “a friend of a friend”, I’m as evil as he is for selling it. It’s a lie as much as ivory is a lie.

I don’t know what I’d say if I saw an album, on someones wall adorned with signatures and asked “whoa, that’s totally awesome, how did you get all these signatures, and were they cool about it?” and the reply was – “I totally bought that on ebay”. At that point I’d realize that he basically funded the guerrilla-signature action of a non-fan bothering these cool artists. I imagine that the guys in Iron Maiden are pretty tired of getting accosted by fans wanting their favorite albums signed, then dudes like this run out and try to make money off their private time. I’m sure that the guys in Iron Maiden would say “hey we’re appreciative of our fans, and glad they still seek out our signatures, but record dealers making money off of our fans is not cool”.

We should, as music fans collectively, NOT buy signed albums that we didn’t solicit ourselves – or as a GIFT for a friend or family or someone we KNOW. Otherwise this should be banned as contraband material like ivory. We’re killing our favorite artists, burning their time that they should set aside for us, the fans, allowing these memorabilia dealers to make money from the true fans, and continue to bother people.

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I was channel surfing XM on the way to work this morning, at the detriment to everyone around me. At once, I was astounded to see a channel called Classic Vinyl. I had to look twice, I thought someone was playing a joke on me. It’s like seeing your name on TV, you have to look twice. As a vinyl fan, I was immediately interested, intrigued, and critical.

You can’t pick everything correct, if you call a show Classic Vinyl, but almost everything they picked was either in my collection already, or I thought it should be. Sometimes it was a little boring, I mean I’ve heard Kashmir by Led Zeppelin so many times it’s like hearing my own voice, boring. More often than not though, I was pleasently surprised to hear a non-hit Fleetwood Mac jam song, and some others that were fun to hear.

Just another reason to keep XM! They’re right on, bringing analog to the digital airwaves! Although, my only, and big complaint is that the digital stream is so compressed sometimes I get so annoyed I turn on my ipod. It’s really dirty. But I still wouldn’t give up the huge commercial free selection for the reasonable price. On long trips, XM is almost a nessessity, listening to long Public Radio shows like “This American Life” and “Opie and Anthony”, even the occaisonal Oprah show is more than worth it’s weight in monthly fees.

XM has a bunch of different classic rock and jam-rock stations, a jazz free-form station, and my staples always go-to stations xmu (indie rock) and The Verge (underground/unsigned rock).

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If you liked “I’m a Looser”, maybe you’re a Beck fan and you love Modern Guilt.  Maybe you sing along with “I’m a Looser” but you’re lost on it’s poppy-ness but love it’s break beats and quirky humor and lightness.  Modern Guilt doesn’t sound like that Beck.  Beck grew since then.  This album is more soulful but musically light.  You can really hear Beck’s melancholy mood on this album.  It’s more dramatic.

It may not be as huge as some of his other albums, but I bet if you asked Mr. Beck, I think he’d say he’s proud of this one the most.  It’s almost as if this is the Beck I knew existed in the pop he was writing before.  Just underneath was an inner child that wanted to come out, and he finally let it through onto tape.

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For some reason, the audio player slowed that down on my computer, if you’re having the same trouble, here’s a link to the file, Right click on this mutha and save as!

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Someone recently turned me on to this great band Mellowdrone. It’s quirky, psychodellic, and fun, while mixing a little Soup Dragons, maybe some U2, and wrapping it all together with a creative pallet knife. Why do I try to describe music with words? Who knows, no one can really do that. Yeah, you can say it mixes this band with that band, try to use some descriptive words, adjectives which have no meaning, really. Throw discriptive words like volleyed spears in no particular direction – “it’s free, not contempt, bohemian, rocky but with a nice roll”.

Then critics, reviewers, bloggers, you add some technical advice like you’re on ESPN zone or something – “great use of non-structured keyboards with underplayed guitar tracks”. OK, no one really writes like that, at least not the reviews I read anyway, but have you ever tried to review or describe a new band with only one album? There’s no reference, no body of work, if they’re really creative they even bend genre’s, blend techniques from genres, combine influences… yeah it’s hard, give me a break. So I’m left with reviewing reviews.

So here’s a review of White Blood Cells by White Stripes from Allmusic:

it sounds exactly how an underground sensation’s breakthrough album should: bigger and tighter than their earlier material, but not so polished that it will scare away longtime fans. Admittedly, White Blood Cells lacks some of the White Stripes’ blues influence and urgency, but it perfects the pop skills the duo honed on De Stijl and expands on them.

So, as you can see, I’m doing what I’m supposed to by just describing things like “urgency” and “blues influence” and “POLISHED”. Someone should write one of those “how to write business appraisals” books for reviewers like me to jog our jargon. Haha, jog our jargon… good name for an indie band, who lacks urgency and enjoys being unpolished, of course.

To be honest, most of the reviews I found of White Blood Cells were really good, like this one by Pitchfork.

I love the rock and roll. There’s always someone new coming along, taking that heavily rooted sound– the music of the Gods– and making the old beast sing anew. It’s Christ and Prometheus, eternally dying and rising again. Jack and Meg White summon the Holy Spirit and channel it through 16 perfectly concise songs of longing, with dirty, distorted electric guitar cranked to maximum amplification, crashing, bruised drums, and little else. They don’t innovate rock; they embody it. And whatever past form of the genre White Blood Cells invokes has been given a makeover and set loose to strut the lower east side’s back alleys in its new clothes. Red and white clothes. (The Stripes could stand to vary the color schemes of their album covers.)

Now that describes how this sounds to HIM, the person, leaving the reader to relate to HIS experience, not someone trying to relate to you in your references, like what polished means to you, what urgency means to you, but rather abstract notions like “music of the gods” and “eternal dying”, “crashing, bruised drums”.

So I’m not going to try to explain Mellowdrone, I just tied in a whole bunch of nonsense just to leave you to write your own review. Here’s Beautiful Day, by Mellowdrone. Run and buy this, you’ll find it in the “underground sensation breakthrough” section.

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I recently found a copy of Love and Rockets 1987 LP Earth Sun Moon.  I never really had a deep appreciation for Love and Rockets.  I did love Bauhaus, but nor did I overly enjoy Peter Murphy’s solo material.  As I get older, and as I go vinyl-diving at the local bins, I’ve enjoyed my own resurgence of material I just passed over when it was popular.  I remember other people expressing the joys of Love and Rockets, but those people seemed to like a lot of pop music, and I just wasn’t into anything too radio friendly.

So now, all that music I passed over is totally un-cool now, and finding it all over again allows me to remain underground while enjoying this cool music.  Not that any of us should really filter our music by it’s popularity, but it’s inevitable.  I don’t like music that every other non-music-lover thinks “is totally awesome”, not because they’re stupid or any other reason than except for the rare song or two, most of the stuff that most rock radio listeners listen to is not really art, it’s like a jeans commercial.  Actually, it’s exactly like a jeans commercial to a great movie.  Yeah its nice, it utilizes art to sell, it could be technically fantastic, even genre breaking in some cases, but in the end, it’s only there to sell some jeans.  It’s only 10 or 20 years in the future when we look back at that genre bending jeans commercial and can appreciate it anew, for the art it is now, by removing, by time, the actual commercial aspect of the film, or in this case, the music.

Was Love and Rockets overly commercial?  Nah, not really, they had that “single” mentality, whereby bands put one commercial song on an album and the rest of the album is art.  Bands in the 70s and 80s even recorded the one hit in a posh studio and hired top producers/mixers/masterers and the rest of the album in a small studio with a decent mixer/masterer, in order to maximize cost on the one song that would produce the money.  In return the band could make more spontaneous decisions with the rest of the album, and even “own” more of the process.  That’s why with a lot of the older albums, you take away the “hit” and you’re left with an awesome piece of art.  Sometimes you’re left with a mediocre hit, and and a shitty rest of the album, but hey, that’s the chance you take when vinyl-diving.

This album has an incredible side 2, and a mediocre side 1.  Run and find this album, download it from itunes, or whatever, and listen to the last six songs.  I recorded the side 2 of this album and added it to my ipod, with no breaks, of course.

And so, here it is for you, too, put on some headphones, chill out and listen to this half of this record with me.  Pour a glass of wine, light a candle, whatever it is you do when you listen to a record, and enjoy.

Right Click on this Mutha and Save as

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An unopened Beatles Help! album found its way to ebay here’s a link.  The seller wants US $1,369.35 and is in Kent, England, so I guess that counts as an import as well.  He claims that the album laid dorment for 40 years and has yet to be opened.  I think $1300 is quite a price, but I suppose if I owned it, that would be a cheap price for me to let it go.  Isn’t it always that way?

The seller has 31,000+ positive reviews, so my assumption is that the album is legit.  I figure it’s got to be one of the only unopened Beatles albums left.

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I recently spent a fall morning at our family cabin in Virginia, when the leaves are changing, and I brought along the dog, a camera, and an M-Audio Micro Track II portable recorder to capture some of the sounds.  I thought I’d put the sounds with the pictures and so, here it is.

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The Dog:

The Cabin:

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I have been making playlists from Genius and putting those playlists on my ipod.  I love Genius.  It’s like my own radio station made from my own music.  But I have music I don’t really like, that I got from other people, and I’m too lazy or pack-ratty to delete them.

So, why doesn’t Apple just make a subscription service, say 15.00 a month or something, and I can have up to 50, 100 song playlists per month?  Then I can use i-Tunes’ library to Genius the playlists instead of my own library.  Well, it should allow me to mix my library AND itunes’ libraries, but maybe only 500 songs I don’t actually own per month.

I’ve actually discovered new music, that I already had on my hard drive and never listened to.  I’m sure I’d discover a lot of music if I could choose a song I like, and Genius could retrieve songs based on what other people have bought that matches what I like, or however Genius actually works, and I could discover music and maybe buy it, or make a new Genius playlist from that song.  Since I’m paying a monthly fee, itunes doesn’t care if I buy it or not.

Let me know what you think, and if you like or hate Genius.  Do you love or hate monthly fees?  Could Apple reinvent the whole music buying process with Genius?

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