Is it an opulin, Iceland?

This Toots and the Maytals song is the bees knees, and if you feel differently I will fight you. I tried to find the lyrics online, Toots being the James Brown of reggae, and I don't think anyone's getting it right. Admit I'm not a patois expert, but no way is Toots bringing up Iceland in a song that seems to be about everyone dropping pretenses and relaxing on a happy day.

Welcome to your life.

KC sent this to me and I couldn't not post it.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists cover Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World"


Ted Leo and the Pharmacists are playing the 9:30 Club next week--as of last Thursday there were 400 tickets or so left but they were selling. I thought about not going, since Mr. Leo comes through so often, but then I remembered that, live, HE ALWAYS COMES THROUGH, if you know what I mean.

To relate it to clothes, as I must with everything, Chris Wilson's MDC shirt is a classic and Tej appears to be showing off a St James shirt (or similar. Although he doesn't strike me as the $85 tshirt type.) And he may be joking, but also a pair of Shuron Ronsirs.

Rites of spring.

I've been in hardcore CONSUMER mode for a week now--can't explain it other than I'm better at thinking about buying stuff than just about anything else. There's good music out, stores are taking spring deliveries (clotheswise), it's light for nearly 12 hours a day. I grilled goddamn chicken yesterday.  So, some stuff to buy.

1. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists--The Brutalist Bricks

I've been a Ted Leo fan since a friend brought back from student government camp Chisel's "8 a.m. All Day" copied onto a tape. Sorry Tej, you've always appealed to nerds, and people who like government like you. That must hurt. I didn't give TLRx's last album too much of a chance, but the new one had me at "Where Was My Brain," which is a punk rock face melter live. Maybe I'll get a full review down here at some point, but for now, I like the album and whatever Matador has done for production, because it sounds better than any Ted album before.

2. Our Legacy - 1940s Sundried Japan Checks at Très Bien Shop


Full disclosure: I'm helping out Tres Bien Shop with some Web copy. That's encouraged me to browse their webshop a lot, though, and dang if there aren't some enviable pieces for sale. Tres Bien is an excellent source for Our Legacy (who I talked to at capsule), especially for Americans, as we don't have a lot of stockists and they speak English and cheerily ship to the United States via Fedex. They also subtract EU VAT, so it's like you get 20% off everything. That's a sales pitch, but that doesn't make it untrue. This shirt, in a 'Murican-toned plaid, is pretty much perfect. Button down collar, double layer fabric (note the blue gingham on the inside)--makes me yearn for the weather to wear it.

3. Gibson Sonex 180

I literally dusted off my acoustic guitar a couple weeks ago and got it fixed. I'd been procrastinating because i expected it to be expensive, which it wasn't. Hey, free money. So now I have big big plans--I'm going to steal back the amp I myself stole in the 1990s (from that same friend who gave me the Chisel tape) and buy an electric guitar. I should be annoying my neighbors in a matter of months. You can read up on the Sonex, but essentially it was budget Gibson back in the early 80s, but now has a rep that's better than many new Gibson models. I have it on good authority that it's a poor man's Gibson SG. And they can apparently be had for $500 or less. Pshaw, I have that in change behind my dresser. That is not hyperbole.

Coming up, I consider buying a new manbag. 

I tried so hard.

This video has made the rounds of pretty much any music-related blog out there, but if posted once before, it bears repeating. In Ear Park was, overall, disappointing to me, but only because of the high expectations set by No One Does It Like You.

Department of Eagles -- No One Does It Like You

Video directed by Patrick Daughters and Marcel Dzama.

Here’s to another goddamn new year.

In high school I got used to snow-heavy winters. I was only as far north as Pennsylvania, but we spent a couple of consecutive years buffeted by storm after storm. Snow, ice on snow, then more snow, then more ice--the yard was like a giant layer cake. Note sure if I remember right, but I'm sure we had less than a full week of school one January. They threatened to extend the school year, but never did. I blame the fact that I'm awful at algebra on that lost month. After those storms you could go out and walk, crunching, across the crust to look at the incredibly uniform jacket of ice around each tree's twig fingers. I'd slip in the attempt to climb over the split rail fence, and have parent-forbidden, brief, and painful snowball fights. This year the mid-Atlantic region seems to be the victim of a similar storm cycle, although so far it's just been snow, rather than the ice storms we had in PA. Maybe I'll just pop open a bottle of bubbly while 2 feet of snow makes me vaguely claustrophobic.

There's this thing--called youtube?

A subgenre of youtube videos I've only recently discovered for myself is pretty simple. People post videos of records playing. That's it. The selected records lean heavily to rare vinyl that you're not going to hear in person, ever--even if you know a collector with an original "Wreck of the Old 97" 78, chances are they're not going to indulge you by actually playing it. These clips work for those more interested in approximating the experience of hearing a crackly recording of Buddy Holly's first single (considered a disappointment upon its release) than the experience of being in the stands at a Phillies/Dodgers game where this dude totally nails this other dude with a beer. Course I'm down for both.

There are a lot of clips that essentially just play a song, accompanied by the album cover or a montage of artist images (not to mention user-generated music videos, which I find inordinately creepy), but the spinning record clips have appeal in their simplicity and honesty. Plus they remind me of sitting at home and putting on punk rock 7 inches and just listening to them over and over.

Buddy Holly--Blue Days, Black Nights



Also, RIP Buddy Holly and all that.

#1 hit of the summer.

Summer goes official on the solstice (RIP Love Fest), but it was culturally official on Memorial Day, and I've already grilled burgers twice already and listened to a shameful amount of Grateful Dead, so it feels like summer. And yet, my search for the feel good hit of this summer continues. Contenders dismissed below.

1. Wilco -- Bull Black Nova
Sky Blue Sky snuck up on me on little Tweedy feet in 2007. I thought it sucked. Others agreed. It was in Volkswagen commercials; and I was horrified (rumors I owned a Volkswagen at the time could not be confirmed). But goddamn if the Nels Cline solo on Impossible Germany isn't one of the best musical moments of the decade. And I never held Passat Dream against Pavement. So now SBS is one of my go-to summer drive albums, along with disc 1 of Being There. While I'm hoping for some of the same on Wilco, Bull Black Nova is too much on edge for casual listening--it's kind of terrifying. (Also, Tweedy needs to drop the "wine-dark sea" construction, he used up his quota with "bible-black predawn" on "I Am Trying to Break your Heart.")

2. Grizzly Bear -- Two Weeks
I can't say much about this song that hasn't already been said by a dozen other blogs, but I'll mention that I haven't gone a day in weeks without listening to it, and it's a rare track indeed that gets that gets its hooks in me as quick and deep as this one.

3. Cymbals Eat Guitars -- Living North
Already covered. Already a little tired of.

4. Peter, Bjorn, and John -- Nothing to Worry About
I know this came out in January, but it cries out for summer. PB+J have a lot going for them here--90s Janet Jackson-y string sample, boom-boom-bap head nodding percussion, an ear-effing chorus (I think they lifted lyrics from their own song). It would sound right at the beach, it would sound right at the Black Cat. But it falls a little short. Too repetitive, too much Kanye association.

5. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart -- Young Adult Friction
First Everything with You was my favorite, all sunshiney innocence drowning in fuzzed out guitars, and who gives a crap what he's saying. Then it was A Teenager in Love, all ripping off Bowie and darkly comic and no one caring. Young Adult Friction is a solid single, though. It all comes together so quickly, the left-right-left beat, back and forth harmonies, library romance plot, and then by the time you get to singalong hook, it's all over. You win, Pains.

Bonus: The B side to the Young Adult Friction single--Ramona--may be up for best winter song.

Somewhere in the Swamps of Jersey: Titus Andronicus

I’d heard whispers about this band of kids from NJ for awhile, and had even checked out a few tunes on Titus’s myspace, but I was still unprepared for their newish album—The Airing of Grievances. It’s charmingly immature and expansive, kind of the opposite of Bon Iver’s focused minimalism.

On Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ (which I’ve experienced myself), they include read quotations from the Shakespeare play (ruined for me in college by a droning professor). How high school is that? And the title is a Seinfeld allusion. But the ragged energy of the whole thing transcends the garage band touches. Patrick Stickles’s breathless vocals and the band’s rough-edged instrumentation (was it all recorded live?) make them a stateside counterpart to recent tourmates Los Campesinos! Kicking my own ass for missing their Ottobar show last month.

Stickles’s lyrics are less narratives than strings of aphorisms and sayings—a punk rock/hardcore conceit. From the self-titled track: “When they cut you up, they’ll tell you that it’s not gonna hurt, but they’re not gonna stop til they see you go to sleep in the dirt.” The pile-on of references to canonical books, plays, paintings, etc. should make me roll my eyes, but the irrepressible grit, fire, and sense of humor of the band make it seem less calculated sophistication than just enthusiasm for all things.

Comparable stuff: Bright Eyes, The Thermals, Los Campesinos!, Springsteen (why not?), your friend’s band in high school.

MP3: Titus Andronicus -- Titus Andronicus

Recommended Listening: The Wrens.

Well, duh. The Wrens are like a rad sweater you forget about for a few years, and then notice again when you're putting away your shorts and tshirts and digging out your corduroys again. It's a little scratchy and has a moth hole in the armpit, but it smells like a good time you had in 2003. I wish they'd put out a new sweater. I think I'm torturing the metaphor a little.

Wrens arguable head dude Charles Bissel has been hanging out with Okkervil River (and Will Sheff, in particular), and they've contributed to an R.E.M. covers album, but otherwise they've been quiet for a long time. Like, almost since I graduated from college. They contributed a track for an obscure Australian comp coming out soon (stereogum covered this awhile back, thanks KC for the heads up). "In Turkish Waters" is a typical Wrens track, in that it doesn't club you over the head with its awesomeness, but quietly becomes one of those songs you look for on your ipod.

The Wrens - In Turkish Waters

Also, if you ever lend that sweater to a Wren, get it dry cleaned.

Photo from The KEXP Blog (live Wrens tunes there).

Recommended Listening: The Sound of Young America.

I think we’re far enough from the dawn of the podcast era that most of the crappy, I’ll-read-my-blog-into-a-mic podcasts have been winnowed away and what’s left is the wheat. Or the chaff, I’ve never been clear on that. The good stuff. Most of the best would work on radio as well as they do on iTunes--This American Life, for instance.

The Sound of Young America is such a podcast from Jesse Thorn, who has developed his straightforward, warm, and quick-witted interviewing into a show that gets a wide range of guests to answer questions that aren’t just prompting for promotion. Thorn is like a younger, better-informed Robert Siegel. Recent episodes that were especially good included Louis C.K., who discussed the progression of his comedy to include foul family material, involving in particular his two daughters. The interview almost had my wife on board with C.K.’s sense of humor, despite his saying things we wished we could unhear. In another show, comics artist Adrian Tomine addresses the race and cultural identity issues that he deals with or chooses not to deal with in his work, and the criticism/hate mail he’s stirred up on that front.

Thorn’s top-40-countdown voice and post-radio schtick can wear a little thin on repeat listening, but he’s got a great manner that draws guests out beyond the usual talk show boilerplate.

Photo from Google's Life Magazine archive.