interrobang (‽)

After three or four years of pretty much daily usage, I finally ran out of space on my first iPod. This was one of the old (but not oldest) 60gb models, and I’d already taken the precaution of not ripping all of my CDs to it - leaving off dozens of Zappa bootlegs, but recently I’d run out off space and had to start removing stuff I just don’t listen to that often, such as all of my Orb CDs, and my early Stone Roses B-sides. But then of course I’d get a real hankering to listen to something that […]

I’m not the biggest Muse fan (only owning Absolution), but I’ve heard they do a good live show, so when they came through Houston last summer I was going to go and give them the benefit. However, I then found out that they were supporting U2 and I’d rather have my ears piped with fresh dogturd than sit through a U2 gig, so I didn’t go. I guess I could have just left after Muse, but TicketMaster wouldn’t agree to my stipulation that none of my ticket price would go to U2 if I didn’t stay for their set, so […]

Given that I had to back out of the last two gigs in Houston that I had tickets for (Gomez, and Green Day) because I was sent to Chicago on gig-day, I was super-bummed to learn that my current loves, The Decemberists, were playing Houston when I was, yet again, in Chicago. But as I was scheduled to be up here for five weeks, I decided I may as well see if there was anyone interesting playing in Chi-Town (correctly pronounced shit-town, Colin Meloy was pleased to inform us) whilst I was here.  And joy of joys, I discovered that The Decemberists’ tour […]

I used to be a pretty big fan of The Cure back in the day, but I kind of gave up on them when they went all cheerful, and I haven’t bought an album of theirs since 1987’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me.  So when I heard they were coming to Houston, I was in two minds about going.  I’d more-or-less decided not to, when I bumped into a buddy, who I hadn’t seen in two years (last seen at Pukkelpop) and didn’t even know was in the country, who said he was thinking of going. So for the […]

Built To Spill are another band I can’t believe are playing venues the size of the Warehouse in Houston (albeit in the ‘Ballroom’ which is reasonably larger than the room I saw The Black Angels in).  They should be huge, and playing to an audience of thousands, not the four- or five-hundred college students who barely filled the Ballroom.
Support band was the Meat Puppets, who I knew nothing about save some notion of a tenuous link between them and Nirvana (which is itself not necessarily a good thing - Nirvana are horribly overrated).  Like Nirvana, there’s three of them (guitar/vocals, […]

Fans of Apple tend to be pretty, well, fanatical, hailing everything Apple Inc. do (at least with Steve Jobs at the helm) as the greatest thing since sliced white bread.  The Mac is better than the PC; the iPod is better than the Zune; apples are better than oranges; and so on, and so on, ad nauseam.  In some respects they’re right: certainly Apple’s designers have flair and their hardware products sure look good, but I’m not entirely convinced of their supremacy on the software side of things.  Specifically, iTunes (the software that ships with iPods) is just horrible.
I was […]

After seeing The Road to Psychedelia at the Black Angels gig, I felt compelled to dig into Janis Joplin a bit more.  So I ripped my wife’s 3-CD boxed set Janis onto my iPod, and dusted off my copy of Myra Friedman’s book Buried Alive.  I’d bought the book almost ten years ago during a spending spree at Tower Books (which also netted me Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey, and U2: The Unforgettable Fire, both of which also remain unread) so it was probably a little overdue.
Friedman worked for Janis’s record company (Columbia Records) as Janis’s publicity agent.  She spent a […]

OK, maybe it’s time to admit that I’m finally too old for all of this.  Last night I went to see another band - The Black Angels - and I’m starting to feel like I don’t belong.  It’s not the music.  The band were excellent, and I was shuffling along as enthusiastically as the next person (apart from the guy who was flailing his arms around wildly and making guttural grunts of appreciation at the end of every song, but I put that down to his superior drug intake and not the quality of the music - he would have […]

Despite having heard only a four-track EP by The Black Angels, I thought they’d probably be worth seeing live, so jumped at the chance when they came through Houston.  This was again at the Warehouse, but in a different/smaller room than the one I saw The Black Keys in - either that or they have remodeled and significantly downsized.  This time the ’stage’ (a wooden platform that stood at most a foot off the ground) was squashed in a corner of the room, and there were sofas in the ‘audience area’, which I didn’t take as a good sign.
The evening started […]

In a post a year ago I described a recently-published chart of ‘best ever’ albums that claimed to be the most accurate as it was based on historical sales.  I posited that a chart based on what people were actually listening to would be better, although this would be impossible to obtain. In that post, I hazarded a guess (by way of example) that the 10 albums I listened to the most were:

Radiohead OK Computer
Desaperacidos Read Music Speak Spanish
Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
Jesus and Mary Chain Darklands
At The Drive In Relationship of Command
Pleasure Forever Alter
Oasis Definitely Maybe
Suede Dog Man Star
Nick Cave Let […]