New Releases Sprouting Like Weeds

April showers might bring May flowers, but apparently they also bring plenty of new music releases as they are coming fast and furious this Spring and Summer. Here are some of the discs I am either looking forward to or they are making me consider exploring a band I am yet to know. I give them to you in order of their release as I know them.

• First up we have Together, the new album from power pop band The New Pornographers due out May 4, 2010. It is streaming over at NPR and worth a listen. This is yet another band I keep reading about and hearing, but don't have in my collection. Thinking I am going to start with Twin Cinema first, but basically all of their albums have really solid reviews.
• Follow that with the new, very much anticipated album High Violet from The National which is streaming over at the NY Times until tomorrow along with a great article on this Brooklyn band. I have been digging this stream, but am going to drop back and pick up The Boxer first. The album will be released May 11, 2010.
• Sliding into June, we have the second album from Samantha Crain, whose first album was well worth noting. The new album, You (Understood) is due out June 8, 2010, and has a little bonus for me (more below).
• Moving into July we have Mark Kozelek releasing Admiral Fell Promises, the fourth album for Sun Kil Moon. I loved the last two from Sun Kil Moon, so will be anxious to hear this one.
• Then of course we have an album I am probably looking forward to too much (thereby putting too much pressure on it)--Dead Malls and Nightfalls by Frontier Ruckus which is out July 20, 2010 according to their MySpacey page--dudes, really, get the new website up (and should I worry about the missing woman in that picture whose harmonies are so much apart of the first album?).
• And finally, somewhere during this summer (it seems) José Gonzáles is going to release a new album with his band Junip. I have really enjoyed his solo work and look forward to hearing his music with a few more musicians around him.

So there is much to look forward to on the music front, although I am about to make some backward looking purchases first. Until then, though enjoy the new Samantha Crain video that features, wait for it, Frontier Ruckus. Ah, love when that happens.

On Aging

Here are a few signs I have noticed lately that suggest there is a distinct possibility that I just might be getting older.

• I send emails home to Neats during the day as a way to remember to talk about something that night (after all it is hours away).
• A single glass of red wine has the power to make getting up in the morning to exercise a near impossibility.
• There is an adjustment period for the newspaper type to come into focus at night (but all good the next morning, so no worries).
• When we get home from baseball practice at night after a day at work, I am more ready for bed than the boys.
• Whereas I used to have students that were from another (younger) generation, I now have co-workers that are.
• Neats and I have started to have those conversations about when something happened in the past, but can't quite remember (while the children look on with shear amazement that we cannot get it straight).

And, of course, there is the whole fact that I am making this list which is the surest sign that I am no longer at the age at which I don't even think about it.

Happy Birthday to The Artist

Who today turns the corner into the world of double-digits!

I love you dear Blue.

Catching Up: The Shins / Broken Bells

I always chuckle when I get asked how I can keep up with all that music. I chuckle because I know that the reality is that I don’t , can’t and that there are a whole lot of folks who listen to and know a whole bunch more about music than me (actually most of my closest friends all fall in that category). As evidence of that, back when all the best of the decade lists were coming out, I noted how much of Paste’s Best of the Decade List I didn’t have/know and what I might pursue based on that (and got some collective on-line eye rolls from a few of said friends).

So I am going to try to pull off a few quick posts on bands that I have been listening to in an effort to begin catching up with the music of the oughts. No in-depth reviews, just some quick thoughts and then (the real point of these posts) questions about where to go next with each band as in the missing essentials posts I had once initiated at The Room and then didn’t follow thorough on.

First up, is The Shins (see—I am so not on top of things). From Paste’s list came Chutes to Narrow released way back in 2003 which unfortunately for me means that it was around for seven years before I heard it. This is an absolutely great pop album that has so much going on both musically and lyrically. As Pitchfork noted in their review:

Not simply an excellent album, Chutes Too Narrow is also a powerful testament to pop music's capacity for depth, beauty and expressiveness.

For me, the key thing is that you could strip this album down and the songs would make for a great acoustic guitar, singer-songwriter album (most evidenced in their slow songs like “Pink Bullets”) , but then you add in all kinds of wonderful rock-pop production and you get an album with range of sound that is infectious.

So the question was which direction to head in pursuing more James Mercer and Shins music. The obvious answer was probably to go back to their debut album, but it just so happened that there was all this talk about the new Mercer/Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse) project, Broken Bells, and it sounded interesting--so that ended up where I went next.

It is a perfectly fine album and there are some songs on it that I quite like, but overall it was a bit of a disappointment. Perhaps I really was just seeking a Shins album or something a bit more cutting edge. The songs here benefit from very talented folks both musically and in terms of production, but I doubt you will see this album on anyone’s best of a decade list. As Pop Matters notes:

Broken Bells may not supersede either Mercer’s or Burton’s respective main gigs, but as a side project that felt implausible to hit as markedly as it has in the first place, it’s a minor victory for both parties involved.

So I believe the next stop for me--and there will be one--will be to step back to the Shins’ debut album Oh, Inverted World!

Agree/disagree?

And while you contemplate that, here are a couple from Chutes (from the rockin to the mellow) and the opening track from Broken Bells which in many ways is the highlight.

So Says I (Buy Chutes to Narrow)
Pink Bullets

The High Road (Buy Broken Bells)

Friday Haiku

First smell of cut grass
Boys--yelling, running—baseball
It is his turn now

Train Music

Goodness this blog (when I have actually been able to squeeze out a post) has been veering rapidly past depressing toward being irritatingly whiny. On top of that, you would think I haven’t been listening to any music as of late. Sorry about that. Let’s see if we can’t correct that, eh?

This afternoon finds me on my way home from NYC on the ole Amtrak NE Regional and while I should be doing some work, train trips always make me reflective and in the mood to listen to music as the cities and landscape slide by the window. I tend to have a certain kind of music that I prefer on the train—typically, acoustic and contemplative. Think Nick Drake, Gillian Welch, Bon Iver or Sun Kil Moon—and if you happen to sing about trains often like say,Tom Rush, that is a little bonus.

Well let’s add José Gonzáles to that list. Gonzáles comes to me by way of the magical Pandora on my acoustic station. He officially hails from Sweden, but given that he was born to parents who moved there from Argentina, the Latin-influence sound in his guitar makes a bit more sense. While he like so many played in a variety of bands of various types over time, entering into his music as I did (late) with his first full solo album Veneer, it is hard for me to imagine him as anything but a thoughtful singer-songwriter with wonderful lyrical guitar sense.

This 2003 album is slow and haunting with little more than double-tracked guitar and voice. As is always the case with me, I love the song that seems simple but ultimately warrants revisiting over and over. And I love the spaces in the music which leave you anticipating the fill. And the fill is beautifully quiet classical guitar that brings a certain tension to the songs as the lyrics float across the guitar line.

Here are two that I think really capture the album, particularly the way in which the songs can be so similar in some ways and so unique in others. I will be curious to see what I think of his second album, which I will surely pick up.

Crosses (Buy Album)
Hints

Now back to my window.

Lessons from Movies on the Road

So the travel continues--and it is rapidly moving from the “getting old” category to the “something must change” as I really have had enough of being away from the family. This trip involved missing two baseball practices, a piano recital, and one reportedly hilarious afternoon of slip-and-slide on the hill in the backyard.

The only up side of this latest trip is that it has involved driving and trains rather than airplanes. Now you may have a variety of complaints about air travel including being nickel-and-dimed at every step of the process, having to basically disrobe to get through security (they will be charging for that soon), being crammed into a small-as–conceivable-space-as-possible to sit in for an extended period of time and on and on.

But I want to add another complaint: the airlines clearly have an agenda of making parents who travel feel as guilty as possible about their work travels with the movies that decide to show.

For instance, on a recent trip to California the movie was The Blind Side in which we see the happy family taking in the down-on-his-luck dude, making him feel a part of a family that will never abandon him. The family is tight and always there for this guy—their father would never leave them or miss a key game—no, no, he is always there as if he almost doesn’t have a job! Sure, I know, just a movie just showing the positive moments—not reality, blah, blah, blah. Try to talk that to me and the two businessmen sitting with me in my row who were all not so subtlety dabbing our eyes at the corners during the movie at every emotional moment.

It reminded me of an earlier trip where they showed The Rookie in which Dennis Quaid plays a baseball player in the minors trying to make it in the big leagues. You get all these scenes of him being away from his kids (he is of course a great dad) and is just about to throw it all in because he can’t stand it. C’mon, that just isn’t fair! And then when I talked to two of my colleagues who were also on that trip and saw the same movie on the plane (and who had young children as well), I learned that they too were a mess watching the film for all the same reasons.

But the film on the way home on my last trip really took the cake. It was Everybody’s Fine starring Robert De Niro and many others. It is a remake of remake of the Giuseppe Tornatore film Stanno Tutti Bene and if you haven’t seen it the basic plot goes likes this.

De Niro is retired and a recent widower who has four kids. He dreams of getting all the kids back together but they can no longer make it. So he decides to go out and visit them all, but discovers in doing so that he doesn’t know his children at all, they never told him anything although were all close with their mother, they feel he was hard on them when they were young and so were forever worrying about not meeting his expectations and before he discovers this all, one of his children has died. Man oh man—really?

Sure everything ends up great in the end—it is Hollywood after all, but it is hard to see the ending when you are in the midst of a plot that feels like it isn’t going in the direction you want. So, I guess it is either time to stop watching movies on planes or actually doing something to change things so I don’t have to count on a Hollywood ending.

An Open Letter to Life

Dear Life:

I shall blog. You cannot stop me as hard as you try. I know you are working at it, but it will not stop me. As of late you have:

• buried me with work including an eight day trip to California;
• greeted me upon my return with family visiting as well as international guests;
• unleashed Spring in full force requiring concerted effort to get the yard and garden in shape (and recover from the havoc you let loose in the form of sequential winter storms earlier this year);
• chided me for still having a winter-oriented header on my blog;
• decided that the California trip wasn't enough so you tacked on an overnight to PA followed by a couple days in NYC;
• had various friends and family email and phone me to remind me that I am a horrible correspondent and life is no real excuse; and,
• taunted me into trying to see baseball season as another problem rather than the source of happiness.

So here I am life, blogging. And while this blogging may be seen as nothing but filler for real blogging, there is no denying that I am, in fact, blogging and you, busy life, have not stopped me. Furthermore, I have many, many blog ideas that will surely come to fruition in short order--once I get just a few other things done.

Sincerely,

cps