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American Soul

John Darnielle can sum up a thousand ideas in a few short paragraphs.

Woundry Opening

I have a wound. This is rare for me, as I work in an office, and exhibit a level of coordination that, although nothing amazing, at least matches what my mind perceives it to be.

I got carpet burn a couple of days ago on carpet that was made of leftover sandpaper. This resulted in my wound, which has such a life of its own that I think I’m going to have to give it a name. Every morning it spews forth yellow/brown goo for a few hours, before drying up and threatening to form a scab by the afternoon. Because it’s on my knee it causes all sorts of annoyance by re-stretching when I move after having had my leg bent at a certain angle for any period of time. This also causes it to ooze more blood. I can’t put a bandaid on it because it’s just the wrong size. When I drive my keys dangle from the ignition and scrape across it.

Not complaining about it or anything, it’s just the first time in a long while I’ve had an even moderately bad external injury.

Ha.

Nowhere Without Bob Evans

When I’m tired my brain simply takes a holiday.

I have been debating as to whether I should buy the new Bob Evans album for a few weeks now. Yesterday the good folk at Triple J emailed me to let me know that Bob Evans would be playing here soon. Excellent, I thought, I will go and see him play, and then decide if I want the album or not.

Just a few hours later I was near a record store, and thought, “hey, Bob Evans is playing here soon, I should make sure I buy Suburban Songbook now, so that I’ll know the songs and enjoy the gig more”. So I did.

Later on I realised where the day’s train of though had taken me and felt like an idiot.

Not to worry though, as I listened to it on the way home, and it is so good I almost cried.

The Lemonheads Are Back

The Lemonheads’ new album will be released on September twenty fifth.

Not much needs to be said, as in about three hours Evan Dando is going to be plastered over pretty much the whole Internet.

(Or maybe I’m slow, and he already is, but I just didn’t notice).

Ten years ago, Evan Dando nearly became a dead rock legend. Due on stage at Glastonbury, he was instead in bed with supermodel Rachel Williams and singer Alice Temple, along with a large bag of heroin. Had he misjudged his self-medication, no doubt an entire industry would have sprung up to make money out of the man, his music, and a final exit that would have rivalled that of his friend Kurt Cobain or hero Gram Parsons. In the end, he arrived on stage two hours late and was ignominiously booed right back off.

Evan Dando has spent the past decade in the twilight zone of rock stardom, almost forgotten by the entertainment corporates who positioned him as grunge’s poster boy in the early 1990s, the sunny antidote to Kurt’s tortured artist. “In the old days, the Lemonheads appealed to 16-year-olds and their mothers,” Dando recalls of his band’s early success. “We caused a lot of rows because dads didn’t like us. Paula Yates liked us, and Bob Geldof used to write ‘wanker’ on pictures of me on the fridge. I don’t approve of him. I don’t think he’s doing it for the right reasons at all. I think he’s a ponce and a megalomaniac. I don’t like that guy. Never met him, though … ” He tails off from such uncharacteristically harsh opinions.

- The Guardian

New Heights

You have no idea just how much I want the VP-ASP software team looking after my databases.

The One You Want

I got Antiskeptic’s new EP Monuments. The record store closest to where I work now is terrible with having small label stock on the shelf, so I’m going to have to get the hang of pre-ordering stuff.

The EP cost me almost twenty dollars, and is only four tracks long - cost ineffectiveness is never a good start. Fortunately it is accompanied by a DVD that is well over an hour long.

There’s been lots of talk recently about Antiskeptic’s new material being different to the old stuff. It’s all mainly along the lines of more space in the music for vocals, and melody, which is indeed an apt way to describe this EP. I’m not sure I like it though. It’s certainly very good, but considering the, uh, monumental goodness of their first two albums, I was kind of hoping for more.

On the DVD the band make themselves look ever so slightly like idiots (though still quite nice blokes) by explaining each of the four new songs, and they mention a fair bit that they want to keep evolving. And they certainly have done that, the EP is very very good, but I feel there’s just one thing lacking, which you could probably call spark.

When you’re making straight out rock, you’ve really got to be bringing the house down. When you’re making pop-rock, country-rock, glam-rock, or whatever, you can get away with just being good. But I reckon that if Antiskeptic borrowed a leaf from Gyroscope’s book and aimed to ‘injure themselves while making music’, they’d reach truly dizzying heights.

Through their last two albums I think they have been playing within themselves, at about eighty or ninety percent, with tracks such as Letting Go or Beautiful In White pushing limits and reaching just a bit higher. The efforts they’ve now gone to, to get more talent into their music, while good, have bought their intensity down another notch, to their detriment, in my humble opinion.

Also, Andrew Kitchen is losing me in his poetry. I’ve got no idea what he’s singing about anymore.

But who am I to want to put them in my box?

In conclusion; I love this release, and I’m really looking forward to the long player, and some reasons to want to sweat. It’s going to be awesome.

Is That Your Cute Black Baby?

Just quickly, for your weekend entertainment:

• A quick article on the merits of MySpace
• A not-so-quick article on why nerds are unpopular
• Thoughts on the game the girls play (The Sims)
• An MP3 and a picture
• And another MP3, this time an excellent live U2 track.

Until Monday, probably.

Windows Live Messenger (When I Argue I See Shapes)

So, Windows Live Messenger.

What an amazing piece of software, seriously. Or, as sarcasm doesn’t go so well over the web, not.

Firstly, the important features. The colours are just great. It’s got faded blue, sickly green, dull red, pale yellow, pale bla… oh wait, that’s grey. Nice.

I have a feeling it may have come before this version, but the handwriting tab is pure brilliance. Everybody needs a feature that enables them to get a fat red pen, and scrawl “Hi! Lol =)”, and then never use said feature again.

The interface is great, especially the bit where everything kind of runs into everything else, it’s hard to tell what are buttons and where scrollbars start and end and all that.

All new! Now your offline contacts are now shown in send a message dialog! How helpful! Still, I shouldn’t be that harsh on this feature - after all, you can now send messages to offline contacts. It’s a great idea, they ought to patent it. They could call it … email.

The ‘Live’ theme (is it live, or live, if you get my meaning?) is really kicking on too. MSNSpaces are now LiveSpaces. Which means they now look different, and the comments don’t work, even in Internet Explorer. True that, for my completely up-to-date software at least.

=/

Thus ends my in depth evaluation, as after one use, Windows Live Messenger (can we call it WLM now?) causes a fatal error upon signing in, and now I can’t use it.

Edit: GoogleTalk now displays what song I’m currently listening to. Here endeth all reasons why I should consider continuing to use Windows Live Messenger. Woop woop!