entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

• Rodrigo y Gabriela, Jazz: a 3-track EP of covers.  The "Lingus" cover in particular is a marvel.
• Mogwai, As the Love Continues: i knew of them but this is their first listen for me.  Solid post-rock.
• Ben Babbitt, Kentucky Route Zero- Memory Overflow: odds and sods from the KRZ soundtrack.  I must insist again that you give the game a shot.
• St. Vincent, Daddy's Home: a pitch-perfect pastiche of `70s rock that somehow feels flabby.
• Mdou Moctar, Afrique Victime: more Tuareg rock guitar wizardry.
• Jean-Michel Jarre, Amazonia: at the intersection of Zoolook's sampling of folk melodies and Waiting for Cousteau's ambient drone.
• Garbage, No Gods No Masters: my album of the year.  They're so good.
• James, All the Colours of You: more of their bright pop with the occasional unexpectedly sharp lyrics.
• The Joy Formidable, Into the Blue: a bit of a disappointment; a lot of their music club singles and demos were really good but they didn't make it into the album.
• Venus Hum, Kindness Rages On: they collect their five previous singles and more than satisfactorily flesh out the album.
• Takénobu. Always Leave a Note: Nick and Kathryn are married now and the new direction shows throughout the album.  Lovely melodies and lyrics.
• José González, Local Valley: González finally adds Spanish and Swedish to the lyrical repertoire of his acoustic guitar tracks.
• Maybeshewill, No Feeling Is Final: optimistic post-rock.  They came back after a long hiatus and i believe this is their best album, easily.
• Adele, 30: not fond of some of the backing vocal arrangements, but it's Adele.  More mature, more polished, all the quality you're used to.
• Dead Engine, Mantis: a San José band!  Old school power trio rock.

In alphabetical order, 2019 releases:

• Battles, Juice B Crypts— The band's down to two members now.  Bleepier.  Vocal collaborations like Gloss Drop.
• Andrew Bird, My Finest Work Yet— He's not kidding.  He keeps getting better.
• Ioanna Gika, Thalassa— She had a guest appearance on Stumptown, where she played an amazing cover of "One Thing Leads to Another", so i looked her up and yeah, sold.
• The Joy Formidable, Y Falŵn Drom— The band reissued their debut mini-album A Balloon Called Moaning for its 10th anniversary, but also recorded new versions of the songs with Welsh lyrics.
• Juan Luis Guerra 4.40, Literal— He remains a force, so very good at what he does, and barely looks like he's aged since he came across my cultural radar 30 years ago.
• Mdou Moctar, Ilana: The Creator— Tuareg Nigerien rock.  Recommendation from a friend, another instant buy.
• The New Pornographers, In the Morse Code of Brake Lights— Another TNP album without Dan Bejar, which is fine by me.  Doesn't feel as good as its predecessor.
• Rodrigo y Gabriela, Mettavolution— Fabulous.  They stretch by adding more multi-track work, electric guitar, and vocals.  Their arrangement of Pink Floyd's "Echoes" is epic.
• Takénobu, Conclusion— Nick Ogawa is joined now on violin by his fiancée Kathryn Koch; here, they re-record some older tracks and add new ones.  They're great together.
• Tool, Fear Inoculum— It's good but... the tracks lack separation.  The overall feel is too similar.  And their ultra-deluxe CD packaging ($45, if you can find it) feels like a cash grab from their legion of slavering fans (i bought the MP3 album).

For this kid, who grew up in Ecuador in the `80s, David Bowie was "Let's Dance", "Modern Love", and "Blue Jean".  I didn't hear anything else of his until i caught some of his `70s hits on classic rock radio in the mid `90s.  Some time in 1997, an acquaintance gave me Diamond Dogs on cassette, but i didn't care for it.  I didn't revisit Bowie until the next millennium.

In 2002, Amazon previewed "Slow Burn" (featuring Pete Townshend on guitar) on their site and that hooked me in, so i acquired Heathen and found it quite enjoyable (and later discovered while listening to the Pixies' Surfer Rosa that Bowie had covered "Cactus").  During that time i was well into my peak King Crimson phase, so i picked up "Heroes" given that Fripp played on it, but i found it uneven and certainly overrated.  I didn't try again until 10 years later (at his point i am verifying this via my last.fm listening data), when i listened on Spotify to another of the vaunted Berlin trio, Lodger, because i'd heard "African Night Flight" on Pandora and liked it, but the album was a mess.

Then everyone was stunned when he released The Next Day.  I thought it was excellent, and i bought it; after that, i decided to listen to the albums that were released near Heathen, and that yielded better results, and i picked up Black Tie White Noise.  Things were quiescent on the Bowie front for me until the ★ news came out, and, well, we know what happened after its release.

After his death, i resolved to listen to his entire œuvre.  Most of the pre-Berlin stuff is good but not gripping; Low is as good as advertised; the two albums after Let's Dance are as bad as people say they are; Tin Machine does not deserve the mockery it gets; and everything from then on is really quite good but nobody seems to hold it in as high regard as his other stuff.  So maybe it's just me.

One side effect of my romp through the Bowie discography was catching more of the references that peppered The Venture Bros., including this gem.

Of course, i came down with GBS two weeks after his death, so maybe i needed him more than i could possibly have understood.  Writing this up was one of the many things i thought about during the times i was lying there, unable to communicate.  So now here it finally is.

I remember reading, as a kid, a dramatization of the British Antarctic Expedition, which was effectively a race to reach the South Pole for the first time between Robert Falcon Scott and Norway's Roald Amundsen.  The story was told from Scott's perspective and it was somewhat tragic.  Thinking upon it now, it seems like the heroic tragedy of the failure of Scott's expedition outshines Amundsen's accomplishment, which might be a result of better British PR, or perhaps just the cultural proximity of our nations (i recall also the story of Robert Peary being the first to reach the North Pole, and of course Peary was American, except it turned out upon later determination that he missed).

I discovered I Like Trains (né iLiKETRAiNS) on Pandora (although i can't pinpoint on what station; easy guess would be Sigur Rós), and i happened to come across a video one particular song of theirs, "Terra Nova", and it was only upon viewing the video that i realized that it is a reference to the Scott expedition, which turns the song from merely gloomy into harrowing.  I didn't expect that the video, which starts out with an almost cheap feeling with obvious models, would provoke such feeling.

How could I have led these men
To their demise and they just follow?
Exploration's last great prize
It wasn't mine

And more's the shame
You will remember my name

Great God, this is an awful place
I do not think that we can hope
For any better things now

Oh, the end, cannot be far
It cannot be far, I cannot wait
Exploration's last great prize
A saving grace, it wasn't mine

And more's the shame
You will remember my name

And more's the shame
You will remember my name

"We have reports of augmented fourths being used in this location."

"Aw, shit, it's the tritone police!"

Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" features a disco-era guitar riff over a New Wave milieu, which together end up feeling dated rather than retro, and inane lyrics (i can't decide whether "jejune" or "sophomoric" would be more apropos) sung by voices so off-key that they're a case example for why Autotune happens. I can see why y'all are so excited about it.

"By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
        —Paul Krugman, 1998

A simple invocation of lynx -dump http://ronebofh.livejournal.com/tag/ | grep ' use' | sort -nr -t - -k 2 | head' yields my 10 most used tags:

• music - 192 uses
• friends - 136 uses
• politics - 131 uses
• soccer report - 128 uses
• fuckheads - 122 uses
• random stuff - 69 uses
• wine - 67 uses
• meme - 66 uses
• food porn - 65 uses
• pop culture - 64 uses

butterflygenius

The task will be to coalesce actual writing out of the inchoate sputtering i inflict upon Facebook and Twitter.

Backspacer is easily Pearl Jam's most disappointing album.  Unlike Vs. or Vitalogy, the problem here isn't some gems buried among unsuccessful experiments; its biggest flaw is laziness.  "The Fixer", their first single, was promising due to its somewhat different sound from previous albums; when you hear the whole album, though, what stands out is how similar it is to the most of the other tracks: it's short, structurally simple, and lacking any musical depth.  The whole album lasts less than 37 minutes.  It's not a bad album, i suppose, but it's certainly not good.  It's eminently forgettable (Results 1 - 100 of about 71,200 for "eminently forgettable"; does that qualify it as a cliché?).  "Just Breathe" sounds like it would be much more at home on an Eddie Vedder solo album.  They'd better pick up their game on the next album.

I've been meaning to post this for over a year.  I think i have issues, but never mind that now.

My Brightest Diamond is a band that's mainly formed by Shara Worden, who produces music that's anchored by her gorgeous voice, which is then surrounded by haunting notes, even in the half of her tracks which are more straightforward pop songs.  Her second album is streamed on her site, in addition to some off-album tracks (i love her rendition of Kurt Weill's "Youkali").  I first heard her on XM (back then it was still XM), and Kim and i went to see her play at Villa Montalvo.  She likes to play baritone guitar, which i love, and she does crazy things with her hair.

Below you can see her playing one of my favorite songs of hers, "Apples", followed by "The Gentlest Gentleman", an off-album track.