My Yankees playoff tickets arrived yesterday. I've got "home game 2" for the ALDS (which will be against either Minnesota or Detroit), "home game 3" for the ALCS, and World Series game 6. Nice set, there. (Unfortunately, if the Yankees have home field advantage throughout, and they probably will, that ALDS game will conflict with Tilly and the Wall at Bowery Ballroom. I was really looking forward to seeing them again.)
I've only been half-interested in the first two episodes of the new series of Survivor, When Races Collide, but even half listening to last night's episode, I heard one guy spew an (unintentionally) hysterical and great line: "I feel like metal is my culture, instead of Hispanic being my culture."
Maybe today we'll get the travel call from the adoption agency. If that were the case, we figure we'd fly out of NY on Wednesday. We don't know when this call is coming, so we don't know when we're leaving. We just have to be ready. Later today, we'll drop H off at my mother and father's house to chill with them for a day and a half while S and I buy furniture, build furniture, get the crib ready, and turn the office/guest bedroom into the nursery/office. It's pretty wild to think that in five days I might be in Seoul, Korea, and I don't even know yet.
Today's Friday 10...
01 The Unheard Music - X: I saw them again last month, one night in NYC and once out in Sayreville, NJ. In New York, I thought they might have been a bit off their game. Of course they were tight, and sounded awesome, but the performance in Jersey was the better of the two. But who's complaining? A mediocre X concert is still better than a great show by _______. (How far do you want to go? Nickelback? Talking Heads? U2? Yes, yes, and yes.) The version of Unheard Music I heard was off the criminally out-of-print Live at the Whiskey A Go-Go disk.
02 It's Getting Late - Galaxie 500: I'll probably never delete Galaxie 500 tracks from my iPod. Though I rarely seek them out, I'm always happy to hear them when they come on. "It's Getting Late" is from Today. That, This Is Our Music, and On Fire are the entire officially released studio output of this great band. All three records, plus b-sides and outtakes are compiled in the box set. Dean from G500 went on to form Luna, as you know; Naomi and Damon continued recording as Damon and Naomi. I think I'm going to break a lazy habit, and pull out some Galaxie 500 disks to hear today. A Head Full of Wishes is far and away one of the best fan sites you will ever visit. It's put together flawlessly and has everything you need or need to know about Galaxie 500, Luna, and all the solo permutations (including Weeds of Eden!).
03 Lady Coca-Cola - Métal Urbain: The album this is on, Les Hommes Mort Est Dangereux, is the only one the band ever made while they were together (though I think it's a compilation of their singles). French noise terrorist Eric Débris went on to form Dr. Mix and the Remix with one or two other members of Urbain. While Dr. Mix is sort of a rock and roll noise outfit, Urbain is for sure a noise noise ensemble. Not easy listening, but great music isn't easy. Nevertheless, "Lady Coca Cola" will empty a room, if you need to be alone. Great! You can also get "Lady Coca Cola" on the Anarchy in Paris disk from Acute. Wikipedia has some Métal Urbain info, as does TrakMarx.
04 Monolith - T-Rex: From the great Electric Warrior. I must have been about ten years old when I "bought" that album. I loved it so much; cool wordplay, great riffs, and all the songs sounded like different genres. I was enthralled. (It wasn't like Kiss or the Stones or the Beach Boys at all!) When this song came on this morning, I was trying to remember how it was that I started listening to T-Rex. By the late 70s, there sure wasn't much coverage of Bolan and the group in any of the magazines I read, like Creem, Circus, and Hit Parader. I can't remember any of my friends or my older sister's friends listening to them. I honestly don't know how I started listening. Maybe I heard "Get It On" on the radio and just started tracking down the records on my own. When I was about 11, I wrote a letter to a UK address on one of the albums, and ended up joining the T-Rex Fan Club. Every month or two I'd get a newsletter and an EP or single that was only available to fan club members. I remember that one of the greatest songs I got was called "Sing Me A Song," and the sleeve said Bolan write and recorded it as the theme to a BBC television special. By now, all that fan club-only music has found the light of day on comps and reissues, but the vinyl singles I got from the club are among the most rare and valuable stuff in my collection.
05 Four Thousand Days - Luna: This is a good song from Days of Our Nights. I remember when that came out, thinking it just wasn't on par with any of the Luna records before it. It was the beginning of the era of diminishing returns for the band. I guess that makes DoON the last Luna record worth having. It's too bad they started sucking so hard; at their peak -- their Slide to Pup Tent streak -- they were among the best.
06 One Shot - Rollins Band: "You get one shot / Don't miss me" is a couplet from the Badass Hall of Fame, I think. The Nice album was pretty much kicked to the curb by critics and fans and, admittedly, it took me some time to come around to it. I kept my ears on it, and I've grown to love it. What serious fucking grooves got laid down on it! It was engineered by Clif Norrell -- a master. In the last year, I've probably listened to Nice more than any other Rollins Band record. It's still in print, but I'm sure you can find it for little more than shipping costs on eBay.
07 Perfect Circle - REM: I actually won that first REM record. I was in Seaside Heights, it was the summer of 1983, and I put a quarter down on one of those boardwalk wheel games and won the album of my choice. It was something that would happen a lot in the early 80s, because I spent so much time down the shore and when I did, I never left those album stands. Are you kidding?! The chance to win new records for just a few quarters?! I came home with armloads. Anyway, it's not hard to figure out why, even more than half my life later, a week doesn't go by when I don't listen to a song of this perfect album. I don't know if there's a remaster out there, but the mix on the CD is far inferior to the vinyl. That's not elitism or thumbing my nose at anything, it's just... there are notes and entire layers of sound that I loved on the record that are noticeably lost in the digital mix I have. Whatever. I read somewhere that the band chose to call the album Murmur because it's the easiest word to speak in the English language. That is, science has proven that saying murmur requires the least effort of the tongue, throat, lips, and larynx.
On a tangent: Did anyone else know that forty is the only number that, when spelled out in English, has its letters in alphabetical order?
08 It's A Long Way Back To Germany - Ramones: Tell me: Why was there an image of Joey Ramone on the screen during the open of FOX's Saturday afternoon game last weekend? It was part of an Audioslave music video intro that made very little sense it was an audio and video non sequiter. Maybe using Joey in the visual was someone's way of grasping for credibility. I just can't find my way to Audioslave. Can't explain why.
09 All Tomorrow's Parties - Velvet Underground: What a vocal. What a band. What an album. Henry Rollins once described Nico as "darkness and cold distance on two legs. The enchantress of the Abyss." That's perfect. I haven't seen Icon yet, but we've got it Netflixed. I'm sure it'll ship sometime after we watch the 11th season of Lost.
10 Baghdad - High On Fire: This is Matt Pike (from Sleep)'s newer band. A seriously ass-whomping outfit and a heavy record from start to finish. If you've never heard Sleep, start there with the amazing, DNA-distorting Dopesmoker cd. (It's loud, slow and low -- the guy in the apartment above mine told my wife he can hear me playing my bass. I don't play bass, but I was recently listening to Dopesmoker everyday for weeks.) Then work your way through the spinoff bands: High on Fire, Om, and Kalas. You won't be disappointed; they'll smash your mind to pieces -- in a good way.
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Now you do it: Put your mp3 player or digital jukebox on "shuffle all songs." It's Friday, so let us know the first 10 songs you hear.
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[posted with ecto]
On iTunes right now: Buggin' Out from the album The Anthology by Tribe Called Quest, A
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