Category: Music
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The Cure, Toyota Center Houston
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 sake… Read more
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Built To Spill, Warehouse Houston
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… Read more
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iTunes: What a crappy bit of software!
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… Read more
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Southern Discomfort
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… Read more
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Beginning To See The Light
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… Read more