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Posts for Category Music

Music Review: The Turpentine Ray; Book Review: Prague

 Posted by Bill on February 11, 2012 at 2:35 pm
Feb 112012
 

The First TV DinnerA friend of mine plays in a band in Prague called The Turpentine Ray, which has just released its first album, “The First TV Dinner.” They describe their style as “turbine room folk music,” and I’d say that’s as good a description as any.

My review of the album: I like it. And I’m not just saying that because I know the guy. That’s not a particularly insightful review, I know, but you can just go listen for free and decide for yourself if you like it. Be sure to buy it if you do.

While we’re on the subject of Prague: I recently read Arthur Phillips’s novel Prague, which is set in Budapest and hasn’t much to do with Prague at all. Or perhaps everything to do with Prague. I had read a later novel by Phillips, The Egyptologist, a few years ago, or tried to, anyway–I think I got bored and quit before the end. So I was a bit skeptical when I received Prague as a gift, but it sounded like something I should like, and in fact was. I quite liked it, and now perhaps will have to give The Egyptologist another try.

Prague follows five 20-something American and Canadian expats living in Budapest, all of them longing for other places and people. The related ideas of nostalgia, longing, and discontent recur throughout the book–one of the characters is even a scholar of nostalgia. I’ve never been to Budapest but I have been to (and enjoyed) Prague and have heard that the two cities are similar–river down the middle, famous bridge, castle on a hill, funicular, etc. As I read descriptions of Budapest in Prague the mental images I formed were all based on Prague, so the book might as well have been set there as far as I was concerned. Perhaps it was my nostalgia for Prague and my occasional fantasy of life as an expat that made me like Prague.

If you’ve read the book (or any of his others) let me know what you thought.

 Books, Music, Review  No Responses »  
 

My new favorite Christmas song

 Posted by Bill on November 29, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Nov 292011
 

Last week’s Studio 360 included performances from Tim Minchin, who I don’t think I had ever heard of before. He finished up with “White Wine in the Sun,” in which he explains why he likes Christmas despite “the usual objections to consumerism / The commercialisation of an ancient religion / To the westernisation of a dead Palestinian / Press-ganged into selling Playstations and beer.”

The other songs he performed (“Prejudice” and “F**k the Poor) were great, too. Check them out here. Then listen to the rest of the show–you’ll probably like it.

 

 Humor, Music  No Responses »  
 

Music Review: Mucca Pazza (plus things to do in Cleveland)

 Posted by Bill on June 28, 2011 at 11:33 am
Jun 282011
 

This past weekend on a brief visit to Cleveland I caught part of a performance by Mucca Pazza during the Summer Solstice party at the Cleveland Museum of Art. They bill themselves as an “astounding circus-punk marching band,” and that’s about right. They’ve got standard marching band instruments, plus electric strings, plus cheerleaders dancing wildly about. Words don’t do them justice, but this video will give you a sense of what it’s all about.They were the coolest thing I saw in Cleveland, and made me think for the first time in 15 years about getting out my trumpet and starting a punk brass band of my own.

They’re based in Chicago and seem to perform mostly around the middle parts of the country, so be on the lookout if you’re in the area. If you like Bill’s Head, you’ll love Mucca Pazza.

Speaking of Cleveland and music, I also caught 45 seconds (literally) of the Larchmere PorchFest, which you should definitely check out if you’re in Cleveland at the right time next year. Residents of the Larchmere neighborhood turn their front porches into performance stages for area bands to play on throughout the afternoon. Sadly I got to a porch only as the last band of the day was finishing up and so didn’t really get to experience the event, but it seemed like it would have been a great time. Far better than your standard ice cream social sort of neighborhood event (though I remember getting to sit in a fire engine at one of those ice cream socials when I was a kid, which was awesome). The Larchmere PorchFest idea came from the Ithaca Porchfest, so you could go to that one instead if it’s closer to home, or start a Porchfest in your own town if you’re feeling ambitious.

Some people at a neighborhood farmer’s market were offering vegan gyros on Saturday. This put me in the mood for a gyro, but I prefer my vegan gyros with lamb so I instead stopped at Frank’s Falafel House for lunch on the way out of town the next day. The gyro here was good (and meatful), and the guy behind the counter (who I assume was Frank himself) was friendly and clearly cared whether I enjoyed my stay in his restaurant. Stop in and visit next time you’re in the Gorden Square area.

While I was sitting at Frank’s looking at the lunch specials on the whiteboard, I noticed a strange little mark after the colon in “Lunch Specials:”:

Lunch Specials :)

Eventually it clicked that this was a parenthesis, making a smiley face: “Lunch Specials :)”. Now this may seem perfectly reasonable as you read it here, but think about it: we write smiley faces sideways on the computer because that’s the only way we can do it with the characters available to us. When you’re writing on a whiteboard, you can draw a proper, right-side-up smiley face, like this:

Smiley face

I love the idea that the smiley face has become so closely linked with the colon-parenthesis emoticon that it seemed natural to Frank or whoever to write it out as an emoticon.

So that was Cleveland. I hope this is all helpful if you ever go there.

 Music, Travel  No Responses »  
 

Twitter review: Tom Waits

 Posted by Bill on May 12, 2010 at 8:39 pm
May 122010
 
Tomwaits_shop_small

Danny Clinch / tomwaits.com

The other day I got bored at work and was killing some time following links through the Web (hope the boss isn’t reading this, wink wink!) and I ended up at the Twitter feed for Tom Waits.

Now, Tom Waits is one of the few celebrities whom I’d care to hear from, so I was intrigued. The most recent tweet was this one:

I don’t get played on the radio ever. Marcel
Marceau gets more airplay than I do.

You can just imagine Tom Waits sitting in the customer lounge at Jiffy Lube waiting for an oil change and a tire rotation, listening to someone else’s shitty music playing on the boombox behind the counter, thinking he should have just changed the damn oil himself, feeling a little resentful, and firing off a tweet from his cell phone.

Well, that’s how it would go in one of Waits’s own songs, anyway. But unfortunately that quip is from an interview he did back in 1979. And most of the rest of the tweets are just a bot spitting out one-liners from interviews and song lyrics, with an occasional bit of Tom Waits news.

Apparently a lot of people (30,429 at the moment) enjoy this sort of thing. The folks at Gibson, on their list of 13 Musicians You Should Be Following on Twitter, say that

Let’s face it, none of us will ever be as cool
as Tom Waits, but by reading his one-liners via Twitter at least we can
pretend he’s our friend.

That’s exactly the problem, though. Tom Waits is cool, and I’d be interested to hear his wry commentary on being stuck in a traffic jam, or his pithy take on a movie I might want to see, or a comment on something strange he just bought at a flea market. But a bot throwing one-liners at me is not cool and it’s not my friend. I can only pretend it’s Tom and he’s my friend if imagine him as a sort of demented parody of himself, like one of the bodiless heads on “Futurama,” who sits around all day repeating things I’ve heard him say many times before.

So I’m not following Tom Waits on Twitter but I was inspired to go listen to some of his albums that I haven’t heard in a while, and to put Down by Law in my Netflix queue so I can watch it for the fifth time. What I like about Tom Waits’s music is his storytelling style of songwriting and his wry, nuanced take on life. This comes across beautifully (sometimes even philosophically) in his songs, but doesn’t translate well into one-liners.

And of course Tom Waits is welcome to stop by any time and criticize my own banal social media output.

 Music, Review, Tom Waits, Twitter  No Responses »  
 

Scarlett Johansson Butchers Tom Waits

 Posted by Bill on June 18, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Jun 182008
 

Look at me, doing an album review.

I never got the whole cult of Scarlett Johansson thing, but I do like Tom Waits a lot (or, his music anyway—I’ve not met the man yet), so I was curious about Johansson’s album of Waits covers, “Anywhere I Lay My Head.” I had heard lots of bad things about it, but I was bored with whatever I was listening to at the time and wanted to hear for myself. So I tracked the album down on Rhapsody and fired it up.

Holy shit it’s bad! Seriously, does she think she can sing? Shouldn’t someone involved in this thing have told her that she can’t?

The first track on the album is an instrumental cover of an instrumental song. Think about that: it’s supposed to be Johansson’s covers, but she’s not singing. And I’m pretty sure she’s not playing any instruments. Maybe she came up with the arrangement? Seems unlikely. So what’s her contribution here, exactly?

Then she starts singing and things go downhill. She sings the same way she talks: in a husky monotone. Weak, not much range, can’t carry the tune, keeps missing notes. The album is so overproduced and full of electronic music and echo and shit that you can barely hear her, which maybe is a good thing. The arrangements might actually have been interesting if they were sung by someone who can, you know, sing.

By track 6 the entertainment value had worn off and I was too bored to continue listening.

Perhaps the funniest thing of all the unintentional humor was the line in the title track that goes “I set the Thames on fire.” I don’t know how I caught it, given that you can barely hear her, but she pronounced “Thames” “tames,” like we’re in Connecticut. I guess the best thing I got out of this whole experience was an explanation of why it’s spelt “thames” but pronounced “temz”.

Oh, no, wait, here’s the funniest thing. I just went and looked at some reviews on Amazon for laughs, and found this five-star review [which seems to be gone now]:

I got shocked over Scarlett, June 8, 2008

Roberta Hotard “Mrs. H” (TAMPA, (gator,) Florida (rather be in Houston))

I dont know where I have been lately and learn something new everyday and today I discovered Scarlett Johansson had released a cd titled Anywhere I Lay My Head. She is a beauty one of the top 3 most beautiful actresse’s in the business today. I enjoyed her in the movie Nanny Diaries and now cant wait to hear her voice on this cd. I am still shocked but cant wait, I have read some reviews and some say she cant sing or hold a note but there are others in this world that cant sing and have a cd out, so I will just have to hear it for myself. Still love you Scarlett. Giving it a 5 because I know the type of work she does and thats good for me.

That’s right, the semi-literate Mrs. Roberta Hotard has given it 5 stars without hearing it, because she likes Johansson as an actress. “Actresse’s”? That’s one I’ve never seen before. Too bad she didn’t save that apostrophe for some of those “cant”s. I immediately logged in to Amazon to mark the review “unhelpful” and discovered that at least one idiot had voted it to be “helpful.” I was so fascinated/bored that I went and looked at her other reviews. All of them 4 or 5 stars, and at least two others (for the New Kids on the Block and Sheena Easton) were for CDs that she hasn’t heard.

Jesus, I can’t believe how much time I’ve just wasted. The internets are just one big soul-sucking time-wasting machine.

 Hotard, Music, Review, Tom Waits  No Responses »  
 
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