My, my, my, Maja Ivarsson of The Sounds you’ve picked one hell of a song to show the world that nasty-attituded Swedish punk-ettes can weild the power of feathered hair and Cheryl Tiegs shorts with cunning menace.
Check out the video for “Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)” at your preferred video hosting site.
In a previous post I told about driving through the Barton Hills neighborhood and coming across the beautiful St. Mark’s Episcopal church. During this drive there was an excellent song playing on Andy Langer’s “The Next Big Thing” on 101x.
The musicians were “Band of Horses” and the song was “Funeral” which you can find here. Band of Horses is on the seminal Sub Pop label. Check it out.
Why I love living in Austin
Yesterday, after I got home from yoga, I ran into my girlfriend at my house ( of all places! ) and she remarked that she had been cooped up all day and wanted to get out and do some walking. So, we cooked up some leftovers and then headed into town.
The question was: where to go that didn’t involve spending money ( things are a bit constrained post move, movers’ expenses, auto moving expenses, double rent, setting things up, ad nauseum ) and that didn’t involve eating things as we are both trying to shape-up post Bay Area lifestyle (deserts, gelato, pecan pie a la mode, ad nauseum, literally).
We settled on a walk around The University. Due to some strain she had inflicted on her knee, my girl was not up for climbing lots of stairs, so we wound up trying to take an easy, wandering route. We walked up 21st street, through Painter Hall, along the College of Business, around the back, along the east side of the Tower near Welch Hall, and then up the Eastern stairs to the Texas Union.
Preparing to leave the union, I wanted to show Lauren the Texas Student Union’s Cactus Club. As we neared the door we heard a really great female vocalist singing.
We walked a bit closer to The Cactus’ heavy door and the gentleman manning the door urged us in to catch the last few songs of Idgy Vaughn’s set. Ms. Vaughn, tiny, petite, thin, with a shock of red hair was singing in a voice that consumed the air of the club and playing gently lilting chords out of a single coil pickup Fender. We caught her final two numbers: “Good Enough” and “Redbone Hound”.
This serendipitous peripatetic led us to hear her beat out a sad, sad song about trying to be good enough for someone who’s angry, or, maybe someone who’d been angry all along, as the lyrics say. It was touching without cliché and very, very beautifully sung. After such a melancholy number, “Redbone Hound” was a real spirits-raising, crowd-pleaser, and several of the audience knew just where to sing along.
The narratrix describes that after having failed so many times trying to find a good guy to call her own, she’s opting instead for a “Redbone Hound”. She waxes that they, at least, will be able to sing along together:
arrrOOOOOOOOOOO
arrrOOOOOOOOOOO
and be howlin at the mmOOOoooooOOooooonnnn
It was such a laugh, such a joy, so funny, we were laughing the whole time.
We were a bit sad to see that we’d missed most of the set, but she seems to have a weekly gig at Beck’s on Congress, we’ll be catching the show next week on the 28th, if not the show tonight.
At the Interpol show the tickets said that no cameras were allowed….
…yet it’s very obvious that the presence of recording devices such as cameraphones, phones used to record the music, and Canon Elph cameras would not be denied. It’s time for BGP and artists and promoters to come to their senses and realize that they cannot stop the shrinking and fidelity improvements of taping / recording / image producing devices. They should take an attitude whereby for some sliding scale percentage they will let you have access to a recording area. The better the equipment, the bigger the royalty. In the end it only serves to create more demand for the band to come back. On the up side, for the artists, if they got in on this cut they stand to beef up their bottom line. Naturally the greedy music industry will see this as another opportunity to exploit the artist for more cash, but it would be nice to find a way whereby artist and attendee both have their wants assisted in light of the ubiquity of recording equipment.
I’m not a fan of the pop genre but here’s my dictum.
The greatest pop singer in the world at the moment is Kelly Clarkson who is shedding American Idol now that she’s milked all that image was worth. Go Kelly. You can sing beautifully.
The best pop song on the radio is Natasha Bedingfield’s “These Words” which is so happy and ecstatic it should make you bubble where you sit. It has an interesting writer’s block angle to it that I really like. Besides, this may be the first and last song where Keats and Shelley get name-dropped.
He was referring to the fact that ethical birth-control pills, the only legal form of birth control, made people numb from the waist down.
Most men said their bottom halves felt like cold iron or balsawood. Most women said their bottom halves felt like wet cotton or stale ginger ale. The pills were so effective that you could blindfold a man who had taken one, tell him to recite the Gettysburg Address, kick him in the balls while he was doing it, and he wouldn’t miss a syllable.
…
The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral. All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex.
Thus did science and morals go hand in hand.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. “Welcome to the Monkey House”. As collected in: Welcome to the Monkey House
Click Read More for more…
OK OK OK.
The Tivo grabbed ‘insomniac music theater’ last night. During 2 hours they played coldplay’s latest track (I don’t know the title, but it sounds like whining and a piano. You know, like all of them) 3 times.
Is this beyond-super-heavy rotation?
MTV sucks.
Then again, if you were trying to get to sleep, this kind of passionless, blasé, drivel might help. For me though, it inspires “The Big Sleep” and euthanasia by carbon monoxide, not “Time for school already, Ma?”.
Opined Paul Scheer on Best Week Ever (from my memory):
Who knew people wanted to hear a song about bananas and poop?
Who indeed.
The Social Bobcat and I both believe that the synth fills in this song could easily fit into the next Katamari Damacy soundtrack. I think I have an idea for an art project that requires some clips from this video…
(hourglass icon spins)
I was not a fan of The Smiths growing up.
Leigh would wear her “Meat is Murder” shirt and I thought it was a bunch of mopeyness from un-tan people with little perspective on life. This is an accurate assessment, but the music’s quality ought not be undermined by this quality.
Nevertheless, through the efforts of my then-g/f and the gift of one of my dorm-mates I started giving the Smiths Best II many repeated listens. Since that time I’ve come to like lilting Steven’s work rather well.
On The Alternative they showed a current-day Morrissey singing “There Is a Light and it Never Goes Out”. The naïvety and softness were gone and there was a hint of age’s gravel in his voice instead. Nevertheless it was fascinating. A man that’s so self-pitying that it’s nothing but the eloquent vanity of an aging lion asked: “Please remember me when I’m gone.”
Wow.
It was really quite unexpected.
Where’s the self-deprecating humor that usually comes after some Morrissey grandstanding? It wasn’t there. Was it Morrissey being, real? My goodness, things could be getting really interesting now.
“P - U - Ess - Haych - O - double-eff / The table is rumbling…”
Big Mac, God sculpted your face so that you could play Michael Score of Flock of Seagulls in the movie version of 1984 musical history.
