Only one week of high-stakes shopping until my birthday

I require sweet, sweet stress relief in the form of bullet-point blogging and nicknack posting.

• Last night's show was interesting but not unfun. No one expected The Faint to take stage until after Ladytron (since the show was billed as "The Faint with Ladytron") so you can imagine the chagrin on the muted faces of all those tween-punkers and tiny, tatted-up scene girls who were still galloping to the show when Todd Fink took the stage. April 20th isn't exactly the best day for a dance-punk band to expect thrashing and skanking from the disaffected stoner youth: Most of the crowd was deathly still until the end of The Faint's set. Despite all this, I had a rip-roaringly good time watching all this musical nonsense unfold. I heard "Destroy Everything You Touch" and "I Disappear" live: That's all I needed. And The Faint's animated backdrops were pretty entertaining to watch.
  
• I got free ice cream today. Okay, fine, not free-- the aroma of baking batter assaulted my smellbuds and forced me to splurge on a $1.50-after-discount Cherry Garcia waffle cone. I figure if you're going to enjoy America's finest ice cream flavor, you might as well commit to a sweet, crisp waffle cone over the cardboard-based sugar cones they were peddling. I work next door to Ben & Jerry's but hardly ever visit. It's part of my "at least do one thing to avoid early onset heart disease" life plan.
• Still no word on a place to live come May. I'm still sticking to the guidelines I set for myself earlier this year, but I'm now open to house designs besides modern-neo-deco-rary. If you're moving out and need a tenant in the Rice Village area come May, give me a shout.
• I'm giving Twitter a chance. There, I said it. When I become incredibly engrossed into the whole idea and give up real-blogging entirely, you'll know why.
  

Finally, the best thing I've seen from SNL in years.

photo c/o Cristina

Ride all night yeah through heaven and hell

Remember Moby? He's that guy who was making highly-accessible dance(-ish) music with R&B samples and guitars and drum machines back when you were kickin' it to the Chicken Dance at the spring debutante. My long and strange decent into the world of 4-to-the-floor started back in 2000 when I bought a copy of Play at a CD shop in Sandestin. Before I knew it I was rocking di.fm and playing way too much Counter-Strike because that's all a 14-year-old kid can do with a head full of techno. Interestingly enough, my Moby intrigue eventually lead me to that other New York music act I've been known to love.

Ah, those were the days.

Moby is back again with "Shot In The Back Of The Head," and an accompanying video directed by David Lynch. And you know how much I love that guy. Goddamn Eraserhead is still giving me nightmares. This video, not so much. New album out in June.


Shot In The Back Of The Head from Moby on Vimeo.

[if:mv: Moby - "Shot In The Back Of The Head"]

The music discovery process

Way earlier this year-- like, trendy earlier-- my friends tried to introduce me to Does It Offend You, Yeah? and their awesome debut LP. They're everything I ask for from a band: Electro, from Europe, and etc. Yet, it's taken me several months to finally give them a chance, fall in love, and throw "Dawn of the Dead" on repeat for hours on end. I find myself in these sorts of situations all the time. In fact, most of the bands that have made a huge impact on my life (Interpol, Bloc Party, and Justice, to name a few) sat around on my computer for months before I got around to listening and eventually obsessing.

I've been wondering if maybe my methodology for sampling new music is all wrong.

For as long as I can remember I've been slyly shifting between Pitchfork, last.fm, Pandora, and the other music blogs to pick up on new bands as soon as they blip on the radar. After listening to a new album once-around, I plug my initial reaction into a very complicated second-order differential equation. Then I decide whether it warrants another listen or should be shelved for further fermentation. Eventually, shelved albums get re-listened or cleared out during my periodic NEED MOAR SPACE TO STORE PORN purges.

And how do you listen to the new bands once they're in your music library? I tend to just throw the album into Winamp and listen to it straight-through and make my judgment. Some of my friends do this three albums at a time, on shuffle, in order to discover their favorite songs out of the new collection of albums. And some people just try each track one-at-a-time.

My process has worked wonders for bands like Animal Collective. Strawberry Jam was all the buzz when it landed on the 'sphere, and yet my intuition was to let the album slide because it was nothing but repetitive noise and nonsense. And so, it sat on my computer for months until someone (probably Cristina or another self-loathing Pitchfork reader like me) made a comment about the "Peacebone" video being incredibly trippy. I gave the album a second chance, decided that "Peacebone" was the only thing worth saving, and tossed the rest of the album to make room for scissoring redheads. And it worked for Fleet Foxes, too-- you don't see me talking about them too much.

Friends are definitely the most dependable way to find music you like. But I also get a pretty big kick out of finding bands myself and disseminating them upon the masses. So, masses, how do you get into new music? Is it all friend-driven, or are you at the aristocratic whims of the music blogs?

Why I love living contemporary

Okay, so let me get my bearings. This story needs orientation.

Front and center stage. To my left, some short, squat girl in a blue dress was grind-shaking her fists into my side, glancing up to me with some sort of drug-riddled excitement. To my right, some typical Bay Area darkwave kid a few years younger than me was popping his Commie-capped head back and forth to the rhythmic sirens and bass slaps. And in front of me, not twenty feet away, was the culmination of months of waiting. And it came in the form of a big, lighted cross.


There they are. Justice: The French band that took Christianity's symbol of redemption and salvation and twisted it into a beacon of their own design. They've crafted the fast-paced soundtrack of my life for the past year. I haven't been alone since.

This all happened at Treasure Island Music Fest 2008, a Bay Area indie wankfest that rivals Austin City Limits in terms of pretentious 20somethings oozing with cred. I flew out to San Francisco with my girlfriend, Cristina, to see Justice and the other top-billed Saturday acts that I've salivated over for a long time. TV on the Radio was there, performing tracks from their new album Dear Science. And those wacky Brits from Hot Chip were there, too, mixing things up for a spectacular live show.

The festival brought out your typical spectrum of San Francisco hipsters. Every group was represented, from the newest incarnation of goth shoegazers to the bright and flowing, handcrafted hippie culture. Instead of ridiculing them, though, I've lately been able to bottle and swallow my sardonic nature and instead just watch as they enjoy themselves in their own perticular way. Because anyone willing to endure the gauntlet of blinding wind and $7 glasses of Heinekin must have some common string with the rest of the concert-goers: We're all hypocrites, and we're all pretentious, and we all love music. And they all deserved to have fun.

Even if they're cannon fodder for really, really great jokes.

Pretentions aside, the festival crowd was aching by the time Justice took the stage. I was pressed up against the guard rail, grinding my teeth and trying my best to push back to keep my lungs open. Everyone was freezing despite the squeeze; coastal winds plus the semi-predictable nature of cool San Francisco nights equals zipped up black hoodies and frozen toes. I had to throw the concert T I'd picked up earlier over my white oxford. I looked incredibly out-of-place in a sea of pierced, gothed-out heads. A French reporter stuck a microphone in my face and started quizzing me on my thoughts about the band.

And when they did take the stage, hell broke out before a single beat let loose. Glow-sticks, water bottles, and concert schwag flew through the air onto the stage. A unified scream from behind me, then suddenly I felt like I'd been flattened against the guard rail. I yelled, too. My eyes bugged out and I saw them take to their throne.

Then,"Genesis."

I can't recount song-for-song how the entire night went, but they hit all my favorites. "DVNO," the Auto remix of "Stress," a souped-up mix of "Phantom," and a finisher of "One Minute Till Midnight," before an encore of "NY Excuse." Fucking incredible.

The night will be forever dog-eared in my mind. It was not only a spectacular musical experience, but it also possesses a certain personal duality. The concert was a culmination-- a culmination of months of waiting. I bought the tickets back in July and had been marking the days off my calendar like a little kid eager for his birthday to arrive. It was also a beginning of sorts. It was my first visit to the west coast and my first big trip with Cristina.

This past weekend was an awesome reminder that I still have a lot of world to see. And to write about.

I'm done mulling: 2008's Summer Song

But first, a few songs I forgot to mention yesterday-- a few covers that I found early in the summer. First was Charlotte Martin's cover of "Obstacle 1," which stands as both my favorite Interpol cover of all time and simultaneously my favorite song by a female vocalist next to "Maps." The other mention goes to Franz Ferdinand's cover of "All My Friends," which takes James Murphy's version and makes it fun. And I'm all about fun.

Now for the moment you've all been waiting for: The song of summer, 2008, is...

MGMT's "Kids," but you guys already knew that. You know I can't help myself when it comes to kids.

I guess I should justify my pick among so many good songs to the five people who read my blog. "Kids" passes all of the initial qualifiers with flying colors: it's Pitchfork-approved indie rock, it features a synthesizer, and it is markedly darker than its title might suggest. And MGMT somehow manages to straddle both popularity and the 20something faux underground like every other band I listen to these days. It's obviously a song I would like.

But why is it THE song of the summer? Or rather, why is it MY song of the summer?

I first heard MGMT back in, oh, February or March on one of those music blogs I frequent. The buzz around that time was promoting Oracular Spectacular as the best thing to come out of New York since that whole Vampire Weekend thing (remember them?). But as with most music that passes between my ears, I listened to their heavily-promoted single once and forgot about it for three more months.

Then in late May, with the summer quickly shifting into full gear, I gave Oracular Spectacular another listen and immediately bonded with one particular song. It wasn't the song I heard back in February ("Time to Pretend") nor was it the other single they'd been spinning relentlessly since then ("Electric Feel"). Instead I became addicted to the droning, deep synth that traces the obtuse beat in "Kids."

While the tune of the song lured me in with its classic meld of keyboard on drums, it was the lyrics that really hooked me. I truly am a sucker for reminiscing about simpler, more innocent times-- call it a byproduct of my rock&roll lifestyle. MGMT calls us heathens out for it in the first stanza of the song, drawing parallels between the way we act as kids and the immature behavior that some people (me) never seem to shake.

But the real reason that "Kids" speaks to me-- hell, the reason it's so pertinent to the summer-- are those first two words of the chorus. "Control yourself." You might as well define the summer for Kyle as a big self-control problem on all fronts. The summer provides all the free time and money I need to be bad. It presents me with... situations that require me to chose a degree of self-respect, or respect for others, over my own selfish desires. And in "Kids," they ask me to control myself at least four times.

I think the story of my summer-- one of unique opportunity, exercises in patience and self-control, and a deep appreciation of my own past-- stuffs the ballot box in favor of "Kids." So if you haven't listened to it yet, well... here.

The song that defines the summer, 2008

So I'm busy mulling over the biggest decision of the summer: Which song captures the ups and downs, the air-starved highs and the lung-crushing lows of these past few months? A quick review of my last.fm profile, compounded with feelings and multiplied by everything I can actually remember off the top of my head boils the summer selection down to these finalists...

Justice - Stress (Auto Remix)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Maps
MGMT – Kids
LCD Soundsystem - Tribulations
The Chemical Brothers – Star Guitar
Whitey - Hahaha
Digitalism – Pogo
Alter Ego – Rocker
Simian – Never Be Alone
SebastiAn – Greel
MGMT – Time to Pretend
Interpol – Pioneer to the Falls

Here, I even built a Seeqpod playlist for the curious. Some songs have such significant meaning in one particular moment of the summer that they threaten to overshadow the songs that have been in heavy rotation all throughout the season. And while other songs were favorites that got a lot of personal airplay, they don't exactly encapsulate the feel.

So while I mull over this big decision with my trusty DR mower/decision muller, anyone got any good associations between this past summer and a track of choice?

Back on the rag and ovulating

You know, I once got into a fight with my English teacher about why Pavement was the best band to ever grace Al Gore's Green Earth. This was senior year, mind you, and I should have known better. But Slanted and Enchanted just so happened to be the only CD in my car for the weeks prior and I had pretty well convinced myself that their distorted stylings were leaps and bounds ahead of Zeppelin or the Beatles.

And so there I was, in front of my little newspaper class, raving at my superior with such timeless quips as "Stephen Malkmus could throw more emotion into a single verse than Lou Reed could belch on an entire album," and "Wowee Zowee covered musical territory that hadn't been charted by any other artists of the past fifty years." After arguing point by point with me, Mr. Cobb gave up on my claim and said one of the most profound things I think I remember him saying...

"Kyle, you'll know you're grown up when you discern the difference between your favorite band now, your favorite band of all time, and the best band of all time."

How true is that?

At least I've got the first two picked out pretty well. Of the moment would have to be the National, of all time would have to be Talking Heads. But my own opinions aside, who was the best band of all time?

I feel like saying "The Beatles" or "Pink Floyd" is kind of a cop-out, like I'm just picking the bands that I see mentioned as "THE BEST" on TV. But my indie-fuck bands don't have nearly the discographies or the impact to be called the best. What band was the best compromise between originality and super-stardom?

I don't know, probably Heart or something.

Lazy is my lifeblood

So I completely missed the boat on ACL tickets, just like I did for the 2005 show. Bye bye Muse, The Killers, Bloc Party, and the National.

Three-day passes are sold out and one-day passes will sell out on the 19th. Which sucks, because this year's show is probably the one that screams my name louder than any lineup possibly could. Four out of my statistically top-five bands are playing over the course of that fateful September weekend. I'm tempted to roll the dice and see if I can just show up for whichever day the National are playing. That would solve the complication of finding people to hang out with and a place to stay for three nights. And chances are that I'd get to see at least one of the other bands on my shortlist.

Or I could just not go.

Is ACL worth attending if just for one day? It's almost like masochism, teasing yourself with 12 hours of music when you could have seen 36 glorious hours worth of amazing performances and packed food lines. And of course, this all hinged on the the fact that you were too lazy to type in your credit card number and address on an easy-to-use website as soon as tickets came on sale.

Oh, well. Skipping a year will be fine, or going for one day and zero nights will be fine, too. We'll see in about a week.

A prolific and housebroken college junior

You know what I like? Big, boldface, capitalized words that denote the theme of the next couple paragraphs. Monolithic motherfuckers that really let you know what you're reading about.

MUSIC

The word on the street is that Interpol has a new album coming out next month. Now, you'd figure that I'd be all over that shit like Pete Doherty at an all-you-can-eat heroin buffet. The truth is that I'm not exactly excited as much as I am anxious and a little worried. Let me walk you through it.

Interpol is like my cute, well dressed and New York-y baby. I was honestly into them before anyone else back during my freshman year of high school. Hell, I'm listening to them right now. I've grown through the most crucial years of my life jamming to their catalogue, including bootlegs of concerts and shitty-quality B-sides. Turn On The Bright Lights was like the soundtrack to my life sophomore year. I made it a downright ritual to open my Friday and Saturday evenings with "Untitled" before I actually got to any parties. It's such a noir soundtrack to those weekends that run late, with overtones of love lost and the darker, more brooding side of music that I love so much.

Then Antics came out my senior year. I was probably way too excited for that album because, though I listened to it just as much as TOTBL, it didn't quite connect as well to my life at the time. I was experiencing the heartaches of my first big breakup and what I really needed (or maybe not needed, but wanted) was a darker TOTBL. Some real sulk-in-the-corner shit. Instead I was greeted with something a lot more upbeat, with Paul forgoing the darkness of baritone vocals for something else. I liked it but... meh. I guess I was slightly disappointed-- not by the music but by the way the music should have connected to me. Though on the plus side, it did cheer me up a lot better than listening to "Dust in the Wind" on repeat.

And here comes their newest album. I hear the first single is already flying around the P2P world, but I'm just not motivated to give it a listen. I feel like I honestly do respect this band more than a casual download. I'm actually going to wait until the release date, buy the CD, and listen to it in its intirety like the indie fuck I am. I just hope that Interpol dishes me something that I can connect with this time around.

Speaking of sophomore and junior albums...

• I haven't really connected with Boxer as well as I did Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers and Alligator. I've also started masturbating to the thought of seeing the National at ACL this year.
  
• I can't get into A Weekend in the City, either, but I earhumped the dreadlocks off of Keke and Bloc Party back when Silent Alarm came out.
• Spoon has a new album coming out, too, but for some reason I genuinely love their entire catalog. I'm not too worried about their new business.
• Has it really been a year since Black Holes and Revelations came out? Matt Bellamy, you sure know how to make catchy music that never gets old.
• Modest Mouse's newest album? Like every other Modest Mouse album-- two or three catchy singles and a bunch of other songs to space out to while you're driving. Be careful, Isaac, or your side project might actually become better than your supposed claim to fame. Just ask Ben Gibbard what that's like. Death Who For What? You mean that guy from the Postal Service?

Now let's talk about

THE ESPLANADE

My AC now works. Didn't cost me anything to get it fixed, either. I called the maintenance hotline, placed a work order over the phone, and they did their magic while I was at Kroger. So now I have AC and more on-sale canned chili than my poor toilet could ever handle.

Here's a funny story. Really funny. So I went to Time Warner to pick up my cable modem nonsense exactly a week ago. In the package was the modem, cords, Laffy Taffy, and everything but the technician they TOLD me that I'd need over the phone that I'd need. So I ask the nice secretary at the desk if I need to go ahead and schedule an appointment. I've never had Time Warner service, and the leasing office told me that in order to get cable service I'd need a technician to flip a few switches in the Cable TV closet down the hall. And she's all like "No, don't worry about it. Those things are amazing! Plug them right into your cable TV outlet and they work!" Right. So I ask her if she's sure I don't need an appointment with a technician, and she assures me that the magic Internet leprechauns will find my modem and give me high-speed porn as soon as I plug the damn thing in. Okay.

So I get back to my place and plug the modem in and-- would you guess-- the "cable" light on the modem is blinking in such a way that all the blood vessels in my eye burst open. I blindly dial up Time Warner tech support to hear the guy on the end of the line, Kenny, tell me that I do need an appointment and that they actually did schedule me one when I went in to get the modem. Strange? Yeah. But they won't be available until Friday. That's fine, I think to myself. I can go a few more days without the Internet.

Friday rolls around. The word from Kenny is that my technician will be rolling in between eight in the morning and noon. I wake up and make myself decent enough to answer the door, watching early morning talk shows to kill the time. The View is really lacking without Rosie, I notice to myself. Then I realize that it's 11:45 and no one has called or anything. So I call up Time Warner tech support again. This time another guy answers and tells me that Kenny actually CANCELED my appointment when I called last time, with a note that said the appointment wasn't necessary. Strange? Yeah.

So this guy, suddenly realizing that there's been a big mistake made, decides to bump someone's Monday appointment so that I can see a technician ASAP. I wade through the weekend without Google Reader or gossip blogs or Facebook or any of the things that make life worth living. And yesterday, I finally got the Internet set up. But you know what the technician said before he left?

"You know, they could have done all of this over the phone."