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Post by orzelc on Dec 25, 2014 10:21:27 GMT -5
Merry Christmas. May all your bands successfully fake their way through "Fairytale of New York."
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Post by orzelc on Dec 23, 2014 6:02:47 GMT -5
Got mine yesterday. Still not quite sure what the laminate is for-- a biggish bookmark, I guess...
Still need to get the pub crawl thing together, though.
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Post by orzelc on Dec 20, 2014 8:50:37 GMT -5
John Samson of the Weakerthans (among others) is a great one I don't think I've seen come up in this. I keep the CD of "Reconstruction Site" in my car as emergency back-up music when I'm out running errands (for longer trips, I hook up the iPod). It's one of the rare albums I'm never not happy to hear.
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Post by orzelc on Dec 9, 2014 11:10:04 GMT -5
I have a book coming out today, and I'm pretty psyched. And to add a tiny degree of relevance, Teeth Dreams was the soundtrack for the final round of revisions, and helped me power through a shitload of edits in a very short time... Now I'm going to drive to the local mall, and look for it in Barnes and Noble.
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Post by orzelc on Nov 26, 2014 17:23:28 GMT -5
I've had the same #1 fav song since I was 13, so that was easy haha. I tried to think of songs that hit me especially hard at different points of life and still affect me the same way now. They came to me pretty easily. Yeah, that's pretty much how I ended up dealing with it, too, but that was still probably 25 songs...
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Post by orzelc on Nov 26, 2014 13:19:34 GMT -5
It's times like this when I realise I have no idea what songs I like Can't choose, can't choose......AAARRRRGGH!! Yeah. I have 890 5-star rated songs in iTunes; cutting it down to 10 required some highly arbitrary extra criteria...
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Post by orzelc on Nov 23, 2014 20:58:35 GMT -5
The Strokes were a great shuffle-play band, in that I like most of the individual songs just fine, but listening to a whole album of it never really worked-- a lot of the songs ended up sounding kind of lazy, and even disinterested. Which is kind of where the style over substance thing comes in-- they had moments where it seemed like they could be a truly great band, but that they didn't care to put in the effort. That it would break their cool to really commit to the music.
I don't think I'd put The Hold Steady in with that scene. In fact, wasn't there at least one promo interview for Teeth Dreams (maybe that Grantland podcast?) where Craig and Tad talk about the band being a reaction against that sound? They wanted to have a band that actually played guitar solos, which was kind of anathema to the garage revival thing.
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Post by orzelc on Nov 13, 2014 7:50:18 GMT -5
Way behind the curve (Amazon's been pushing it at me for months), but the Strand of Oaks record is pretty good. In a "War on Drugs" sort of vein (thus maybe risky to post here...), but a bit louder.
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Post by orzelc on Nov 2, 2014 8:08:28 GMT -5
It's hard to do the number-of-tickets cap, because for just about any cap size you pick, there will be groups larger than that who want to go together. And then you end up in the lottery situation where several members of a large group have to each try to buy tickets for half the group at the same time, leaving you with the scenario where only half of the big group has tickets. (I've seen that happen with tickets to NCAA basketball tournament games...)
And, of course, it's really easy for resellers to hire large numbers of people to buy small groups of tickets over the Internet, and pay them a pittance compared to what the commercial resellers will clear on the transaction.
Capping the maximum resale price would attack the problem from that side, but it's probably not feasible politically, especially now that the big ticket services have made their peace with StubHub and the like. The people who are making money on selling tickets, on either the primary or secondary markets, are making money, and have no incentive to change.
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Post by orzelc on Nov 1, 2014 6:40:45 GMT -5
I actually have been in a group that was stopped from buying tickets outside a venue. It was a minor-league baseball game, and another group had extra tickets they were trying to unload. A cop came up to us as we were about to pay for the tickets, and said "Jesus, don't hand over the cash right here where I can see you. Go around the corner, or something."
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Post by orzelc on Oct 30, 2014 16:21:55 GMT -5
[br ]my SafeWord is comic sans Surely "Comic Sans" is an un-safe word for a true font fetishist...
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Post by orzelc on Oct 20, 2014 6:21:29 GMT -5
Definitely "Navy Sheets." In the "songs lots of people love" category, I've never liked "Hornets! Hornets!" all that much.
(Prompted by seeing the latter turn up on European set lists...)
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Post by orzelc on Oct 4, 2014 6:00:28 GMT -5
In one of the early Teeth Dreams promo interviews, Craig mentions sitting down and watching The Last Waltz with Tad as a significant event shortly before they formed the band. Might've been in that Grantland podcast they did. Assuming I'm not wholly fabricating that memory, that would tend to suggest that The Band was on his mind.
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Post by orzelc on Sept 29, 2014 12:33:06 GMT -5
Not sure how much fan overlap there is between these, but I love both bands. And I have ended up with an extra ticket for this coming Saturday's Afghan Whigs show at the Beacon Theatre in NYC (October 4, 8pm). My wife bought me two as a birthday present, but our child care fell through, so she can't come.
If you'd be interested in the extra, let me know.
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Post by orzelc on Aug 3, 2014 6:33:53 GMT -5
These days, the live "Stuck Between Stations" has that big dramatic pause where the piano line used to be before "We drink and we dry up...". That works surprisingly well.
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Post by orzelc on Jul 29, 2014 20:55:38 GMT -5
Boys & Girls Sep Sunday Teeth Dreams Almost Killed Me/ stay Positive (very close, order easily flipped) Heaven is Whenever
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Post by orzelc on Jul 22, 2014 5:34:16 GMT -5
"The Swish" came up on shuffle-play while I was driving yesterday, and it occurred to me that if you interpret "most Hold Steady-esque line" as something you can't possibly imagine any other band committing to tape, something like "She said my name's Neal Schon, but people call me Nina Simone. Some people call me Andre Cymone, I survived the 80's one time already." would work. I have no idea what that means, but I'm pretty sure nobody else would've come up with that and put it on an album.
On the other hand, if you took nowah's suggestion and extended it back one line to pick up the St. Theresa reference, you'd have just about all of Craig's lyrical obsessions in one couplet. "They were breaking bread and giving thanks, with crosses made of pipes and planks leaned up against the nitrous tanks" is another good run at that.
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Post by orzelc on Jul 19, 2014 7:58:25 GMT -5
Off the new record, I'm kind of fond of "I know I made them a promise, but those are just words, and words can get weird."
Off older records, probably "She said 'You're pretty good with words, but words won't save your life,' and they didn't, so he died."
(There may be a theme here that may or may not relate to the fact that I spend a lot of my time writing books and blog posts...)
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RAGS EP
Jul 10, 2014 19:39:13 GMT -5
Post by orzelc on Jul 10, 2014 19:39:13 GMT -5
I'm so glad to have a version of Look Alive with the bones and brains and blood line now. I like the guitar on the closing chorus too. Too bad we didn't get the lust and the trust and the sacrifice on Only Thing though. Can anyone make out the backing vocals at the end of that one? I'm guessing "Oh, the tangled webs we weave" for the backing vocals. Something close to that. Interesting how much that got pared down lyrically. "Wait a While" had some changes, too, but not nearly the same extent.
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Post by orzelc on Jun 29, 2014 5:55:17 GMT -5
"... I remember they had this pretty cool discussion board. I guess they seemed a bit nervous. Do you think I'm that stupid?"
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Post by orzelc on May 23, 2014 9:54:26 GMT -5
The live thing I always notice isn't a lyric, but a change in the guitar break in the chorus of "Hoodrat." The first time through, it's the chugging seven-note thing from the studio version, the second time it's three longer notes. Probably because it's easier to do at the faster tempo it tends to have live.
I particularly notice this, because that seven-note riff is what originally got me into them, when I heard that on KEXP back when Separation Sunday first came out. Something about that break got me to sit up and take notice, and once I heard the lyrics, I said "I need to hear more of this band, immediately."
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Post by orzelc on Apr 30, 2014 5:00:05 GMT -5
Why is Galen standing on a box in that still? It's not like he needs the extra elevation to see over Craig... More seriously, nice video. Something good to point to when talking about their on-stage energy that wasn't shot with a cell phone. This was minutes before the walkout while the Lou Reed song played and it was an awkward little stairwell/landing area by the stage door. I think he was just trying to make room for everyone. The video edit clips this scene up and also the high-five scene before the walkout but hopefully the true joy and excitement they share with each other before taking the stage comes through. Definitely like the video, and agree about the joy and excitement. It was one of the most striking things about the show I saw in Albany a few weeks back-- where Cheap Girls mostly looked nervous (except when some idiot jumped on stage briefly), THS looked like they were having a blast. Which is, of course, part of what makes them such a great live act.
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Post by orzelc on Apr 29, 2014 8:18:24 GMT -5
Why is Galen standing on a box in that still? It's not like he needs the extra elevation to see over Craig...
More seriously, nice video. Something good to point to when talking about their on-stage energy that wasn't shot with a cell phone.
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Post by orzelc on Apr 27, 2014 6:49:56 GMT -5
"Runner's High" seems like it could be awesome live. The break after "When I came to in Houston..." has the potential to be a great slow build through the list of things the narrator doesn't feel. I'm glad to see it turn up.
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Post by orzelc on Apr 12, 2014 13:05:40 GMT -5
I think Craig changes mics because he spits all over the foam wind screen I could believe that. He's nothing on the guy from Cheap Girls, though, who sings with his eyes closed and holds his position relative to the mic by pressing his nose against it. Kate looked at that and said "I hope they're going to replace that before anybody else uses it."
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