Category Archives: Music

Videogame Inferno – Arcade Fire Neon Bible Review

2 Replies

Edit: Photo credits below, or click on the photos - Someone in the comments pointed out that this review isn't well structured. I won't argue with that, my goal here is to occasionally ramble and have fun sticking words together. Apologies to grumpy music lovers. Photo credits at the bottom or just click on 'em.

The Arcade Fire is like a flock of urban pigeons. Humbly aware that they’re only alive because their ancestors survived millions of years of evolution yet unabashedly willing to crap on pretentious hipsters.

Is their music world changing? Maybe, but at the very least you can listen to it without fear of the feeling that comes after really getting into a band and then wondering what the hell you were thinking a few months later. And boundless talent notwithstanding, the violinist is the cutest little bird to grace this planet in quite a while.

Maybe I’m getting old but at this point in my life I’m starting to listen to what musicians are actually saying. I have this sense that they’re just people so damn determined to explain the inexplicable that they’re forced, after realizing the limitations of conventional linguistics, to look for wooden utensils with strings attached to get their point across. Which makes writers uncoordinated musicians I guess. People who pick up instruments without that motivation reek of boy band illiteracy. With Arcade Fire you get the feeling they’re angst ridden due to a birth with only two arms, more of which would surely be put to use simultaneously playing additional instruments.

The lead singer and feminine voice of the band are married. And they’re all adept at music. She jumped on the drums and people were scampering about, grabbing instruments and skillfully flogging various inanimate objects with sticks and ropes. The crowd was happy.

I don’t dance sober, and I wasn’t totally myself, but I would have anyway.

For your viewing pleasure here they are, crammed in an elevator I wish I was stuck in, playing the title track. Photo credits below.

STARTUP UPDATE: The website is coming along, prototype is done, just trying to get it production ready.

The top photo is by Kathryn on Flickr. Check it out here.

The Violinist is Sarah Neufeld, photo is used with permission from Jim Newberry, read more about the photo here.

Putting Potholes in Street-Cred

1 Reply

Ahhh, street credibility. The elusive descriptor earned through a lifetime of bullet dodging and the development of innate talent. Sean (Puff (P-Diddy) Daddy Sean Puffy John) Combs decided it would be a good idea to put a cavernous pothole in his credibility by partnering with Burger King (that’s BK to those in the know) to “buy” a YouTube channel. Get this:

Soon after, a response to the “king of music and fashion” emerged on YouTube. Witness LisaNova’s mysteriously free YouTube video response.

Next up on P-Diddy’s list of business partners… Dan Rather.

Ize of the World

6 Replies

Edit: Scroll down for some interesting comments like “It’s actually a bend that projects upward from the 3rd of the major 1rst to a 4th spanning the length of one of the arpeggios that he plays for the rest of the chorus.”
Every once in a while you buy a CD and find a great song that for whatever reason never gets played on the radio. For me that song is Ize of the World by the Strokes. Weird new album, great album, but this one song just stands out.

But it ends abruptly and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. At first I thought there was a glitch in the disc. Then I looked at the title of the song “ize…” and the last word of the song is vapor…” so in case you were wondering what’s wrong with your CD, there you go.
Of course music reviews are what brilliant poets do to get exposure instead of cutting off their ears so I’ll leave it to the madman at DarkBlackReviews to spell it out…

And Then, out of absolutely fucking nowhere, arguably the best song on the album and one of the Strokes finest moments is ‘Ize Of The World’. Starting on more catchy lyrics and more great vocal work is the most powerful and influential song on the record. Another slice of magic…

I’m tempted to just upload the mp3 to this blog just to see how good their lawyers are, but I digress…

And a very cool libertarianesque quote from Tolstoy found in the comments of Malcolm Gladwell’s new blog. He has me teetering on the brink of a New Yorker subscription:

“Reasoning led him into doubt and kept him from seeing what he should and should not do. Yet when he did not think, but lived, he constantly felt in his soul the presence of an infallible judge who decided which of two possible actions was better and which was worse; and whenever he did not act as he should, he felt it at once.”

Swap infallible judge with invisible hand and you see where I’m going with this.? And Hayek, agreeing with Tolstoy:

“… it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process. “

Hayek assumes that freedom is freedom from some other individual, a politician, that is trying to assert control. If you interpret Hayek’s work assuming freedom from one’s self instead of the state then the principles of economics start to morph into a victorian era self help guide.

Update: The sun is about to rise but I can’t stop thinking about this. The brain, according to Jeff Hawkins and some other brainiacs, is a pattern recognition computer. It can add, subtract, etc. but it’s not really designed for that. If our experiences burn themselves into our brains and act as decision making algorithms far more complex than our conscious calculators then why would conscious decision making evolve at all if it just gets in the way? Two ideas. a> It’s a side effect, an unintended consequence of the size of our brains or b> It has a purpose, it’s good at figuring things out for which we have no experience. This is a lot like the current state of physics. General Relativity covers the physics of objects moving near the speed of light while Newtonian physics work well enough for everything slow. Except nobody designed our brains. Just goes to show the power of the emergent order we know as darwinian evolution.

HOB Nobbin’ — White Stripes Review

Leave a reply

I went to the new House Of Blues in San Diego last night. Kegan and Sarah were really pretty good. House of Blues SD is nice but reeks of corporate top downery. I say that as a right leaning curmudgeon with a finance degree so you know it’s bad. H.O.B. is going down the road of Krispy Creme. They’re trying to get big in an era when small is the new big. Short sell.

The White Stripes’ new album on the other hand has restored my faith in music. Even though Rolling Stone is giving it good reviews I still like it. My only conclusion is that to come to a conclusion about music you have to avoid reviews. For example here are a couple of quotes from the best and worst reviews of the new White Stripes album.

“It’s an album so strong and so unexpected that it may change the way people hear all its predecessors. And that’s just a start. Listen long enough, and this album might change the way you hear lots of other bands, too. “

and the bad…

[It] tries putting everything from the buffet on your plate, even the Jell-O you’re not going to eat. C’mon, sounding like a stripped-down version of the Stooges wasn’t such a bad thing, was it?

I guess reasonable people can disagree but I like Jell-O. And just how pervasive a term is subjective? To use the word contrived to describe this album is just dumb. Here’s a quote from Instinct blues “Well the crickets get it, and ants get it , I bet you bet the pigs get it, even the plants get it, cmon now and get with it… so why don’t you?”

On the other hand the album was recorded on analogue equipment. Was quality at issue or are luddites just the new black? On the other other hand they didn’t really promote this album so to say they’re using gimmicky production techniques to stir hype is itself a contrived notion.

It’s a great album, like a good bar scene from Deadwood, but don’t take my word for it.

Music

Leave a reply

3:49AM… Just got back from the local watering hole/dance place. Maybe it’s just me but there’s something theraflutic about dancing. Maybe I’m just happy because I remembered my blog password and met a girl named Karen and… managed to grab a copy of the new Gorillaz album. It’s good. Went to E3 and bought a Dell 2405FPW which I’ll be reviewing shortly. It’s big, it’s beautiful, it’s wide. I took the above photo at E3, it’s a racing game that was running on a Mac G5 with a GF6800(if you believe the rumors). Frankly I wasn’t that impressed. The graphics were high def, I’m guessing 720p at about 25FPS and the physics weren’t great but it’s early. There’s something to be said for 1080p at 60FPS. How is it that anything interlaced made it into the high definition spec? I guess they didn’t foresee the death of interlacing even though it died in the late 90s in 14 inch monitors. PS3 has 1080p support. Xbox 360 doesn’t. That’s not going to be a small detail in a couple of years. I’ll get some video of the 24” beast online in a day or two. Stay tuned…

Regarding music, it’s on my long list of things to study. What makes a song good? Why is it that we want songs roughly 3 minutes in length? Why is it that song structure is so structured? It has to say something about our attention span and our predictability. Google has new data mining software that can infer new translations based on existing human created translations. There also exists software that can generate catchy tunes based on mathematical breakdowns of past #1 hits. We don’t know why it works but that’s not as important as the fact that it does work. It reeks of emergence. Emergence is my religion by the way. I substitute complexity for faith and it works. If I’m not capable of comprehending complexity then it acts as a separation between reality, which scares me, and some unknown but real ideal. Goethe had something to say about this but he used the torch analogy.

Truth is a torch, but a terrific one; therefore we all try to grasp it with closed eyes, fearing to be blinded. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims

Interestingly, one of Goethe’s major influences was the bible. I read “Maxims and Reflections” every morning. Trying to develop my own moral code but it’s a derivitave of something entirely mainstream. What does that mean? Time for bed, pardon my insobriety.