It's lonely out there on the maroon

The Minus 5: (The Gun Album)

Sometimes buying albums online causes problems. Two particular problems occurred after my purchase of The Gun Album off eMusic. First, the cover is all black and looks awful if you try to print it out on regular paper so I had to spend extra for photo paper. Second, when the group is known for its use of guest musicians, you don't have the information about who's appearing on each track.

Actually, when it comes to listening to the album for the first time or two, not thinking about all the special guest stars makes it easier to enjoy the album for what it is and not for the presences of Wilco! Colin Meloy! Kelly Hogan! Peter Buck! etc. etc. Of course if I want to write a blog entry about the album, I have to come off as vague and ignorant.

This album was a solid "eh" upon first and second listen, but after not listening to it for a while and putting it on again, it really sounds a lot better. It's got a solid alt-country rating of 82 Tupelos and maintains a musical consistency throughout the lineup changes and guest appearances from song to song.

"Extra gas can. We forgot the extra gas can."

(Now that title is a reference no one will get.)

So because of the impeding storms this evening, we had the TV tuned to Judge Joe Brown, more for the weather map in the corner than for the show itself. But as it was ending, up came an ad for tourism in my hometown! Because apparently Judge Joe Brown is the most expensive advertising that Tourism London can afford.

Judging from the acting, they couldn't afford much. A family is stranded at the side of the road, and a Mountie comes and helps them out and starts telling them how much fun they could have had in London instead. They could have gone to Sunfest! (which was started by the father of my 5th grade archrival) And best of all, they would have only needed one tank of gas, the Mountie helpfully explains, holding up a gas can.

It was so bad that it completely made my day. And my day was already pretty good, seeing as I found out I'm going to San Diego next month.

The Big Snit

So here's one of those wacky National Film Board videos from the 1980s: The Big Snit. I think The Simpsons knocked off the "carrost" joke with Homer's Scrabble rack in the famous KWYJIBO scene.

I bought who in the what now?

Bloc Party: Silent Alarm

So, um, I guess I bought this album. It was there in my iTunes library and everything. I don't like it, I don't hate it. I honestly don't remember it. I'm pretty sure I listened to it once.

I think it's supposed to sound like Franz Ferdinand, and hence like Interpol or Gang of Four. Yeah, that's it, mention an influence, that'll make you seem smart. Um, I think there's a song called "Helicopter" on it.

I really don't think there's a worse thing to say about an album than that it left completely no impression on you. Though in fairness, I also have a remix of "Two More Years," a song that doesn't appear on this album, that I downloaded off Stereogum and it's pretty great. That may be due to MSTRKRFT though.

Let's pretend we don't exist

Of Montreal: The Sunlandic Twins

Elephant elephant elephant elephant elephant elephant six! Now that the formalities are out of the way, let's discuss The Sunlandic Twins.

While an album's alt-countriness is defined in terms of Tupelos (read the comments), its tweeness is defined in terms of Heavenlies. The Sunlandic Twins scores a good solid 68 Hv - it's pretty twee. The arrangements are quite elaborate; some songs suffer from being too fancy, almost from having too many instruments. "Wraith Pinned in the Mist and Other Games" and "Oslo in the Summertime," in particular, would probably sound better stripped down.

This album suggests a new entry in my personal glossary of musical terms to be called the Sunlandic Rule: Don't put the album's best song on the bonus disc! "Art Snob Solutions" is fun, has extremely funny lyrics, and was probably considering too erudite for the main album. The average indie pop fan probably doesn't know who Tarkovsky and Apollonaire are, but Destroyer doesn't avoid the obscure references, so why should Of Montreal?

Bizarro World

So I'm in Canada for a couple of days due to an immigration issue, and, as is typical when Emily and I go to Canada, we end up shopping in stores we could have shopped in at home, and we're in the Gap. Emily is trying on clothes and I'm listening to the music. The song seems familiar and I can't place it. After a while, I start thinking: "Holy crap! Is this the High Dials?" The High Dials are approximately the 7th most important indie band from Montreal.

So I walk a couple of stores down to the mall record store to check. I look in the rock section for the High Dials album, but it's not there. Quelle surprise. But apparently the problem was that I didn't notice they had a separate indie rock section. So I find the High Dials album and it turns out I was wrong (It was New Order's "Waiting for the Siren's Call.") And while I'm browsing, they start playing Sunset Rubdown's "Us Ones in Between." Bizarro.

World Cup fever actually exists in Canada. I wasn't surprised by the amount of official World Cup merchandise, but rather by the huge number of knock-offs. Stores like Roots, The Bay, and so forth realized that country names are not copyrighted and you can slap them on a T-shirt, no problem. I even saw something that looked like a baseball jersey with the name "Germany" on the back, which is inauthentic on so many levels. There's only one man a baseball jersey with the word Germany on it should honor, the last man in history to steal first base.

We went to Toronto and at lunchtime it was even more intense. A huge crowd gathered on the sidewalk outside a sports bar to get a peek of England/Trinidad. A china shop on Bloor put two big flatscreens in its window to draw a crowd; they also had a big sign that said "Come in and see the world of cups!" Also, the number of cars with window flags was huge in both London and Toronto: imagine the scene in the US after 9/11, but with flags of England, Portugal, Italy, Poland, and other countries instead of just American ones. Doubly bizarro.

Some other random observations of Toronto:
On Yonge there's a food cart called "Mrs. Dalloway's Hot Dog Stand." The frankfurters must be 100% Virginia wolf.
A couple of blocks north of the hot dog stand, all located within half a block of each other, are The Blue Man Group, The Church of Scientology, and the Toronto Hemp Company. Coincidence? I don't think so.