Premature judgements It is terrible whenever I buy any new music and I start listening to it I form an opinion almost instantly. When my first impression is negative I quite frequently do not listen to that music again and it gets buried in my cd pile. In many cases this is justified but in others it is not. Luckily I had not yet filed Ryan Adams second album Gold in my alphabetically sorted cd shelves from where it would have been very difficult to get back into the cd player (there are 1,000+ contenders). A couple of days ago I had dismissed it as mainstream and bland. I relistened and must admit that it is definitely one of the outstanding releases in this for me up to now quite poor year in terms of pop/rock music (another premature evaluation?). I won't go into details here but Ryan Adams album is very impressive. It is amazingly varied and consistent at the same time as each song is an entity which fits very well into the flow of the whole record. There are 16 tracks on the main disc (70+ minutes) plus 5 tracks (another 20 minutes) on the bonus disc. And there is no really embarassing track and hardly any really outstanding tracks neither. The music is in the songwriter folk jazz country rock vein. Very eclectic with influences ranging from Bob Dylan (Firecracker with some very competent mouthharp play), Van Morrison (Answering Bell) to Mick Jagger (the bluesrocker Tina Toledo's Street Walkin' Blues). The music only holds together because of Adams voice. It is so versatile. Even if Adams uses many riffs and arrangements from rock history (especially the 70s I feel) this guy has already created his own style. He makes me think a little bit of Jeff Buckley without the opera singer attitude touch (which I always hated). More down to earth and settled. I still prefer Adams first album Heartbreaker as more heart blood flowed into that disc. But even here Adams who is only 26 years old shows that he is probably THE songwriter voice in these times. Apparently in concert he is drunk and brilliant. One of my favourites from the main disc is the ballad Nobody Girl which does not get boring in the 9 minutes and 39 seconds it lasts. The bonus disc alone is worth the money as there the music is less polished and more like I would have liked him to sound after Heartbreaker.

No surprise

Surfin' till the end of the web The Beatles White Album covered by blues musicians I have been linked by Travelers Diagram, "a semi-daily digest/journal/appreciation of art, music, media, and other miracles of creation". They saw Lambchop live the day before yesterday and it was great apparently. Backlinked by Geoff Parkes from Logged Off and by Bellmas. Thank you Tim, Geoff and Armando. And I got an e-mail from Delusions of Adequacy, an Australian zine on independent music and more (Geoff writes for it) if I'd be interested to join their staff and write about Germany. Mmm. I have to think about that one.

The book Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin really intrigues me: "A unique neurologist-Zen Buddhist has written a tome that is a map to all the mysteries of meditation and mind. Take breathing out, for example. We spend just over half of our breathing time exhaling. For meditating monks, it's a full three-quarters. EEGs show us that the act of exhaling helps physically quiet the brain." I just found a website with a Google pagerank of 1. Informa. Bloody hell Andrew, Giovanni, Simon and friends. You have been doing some very efficient online marketing there. ;-( By the way the easiest to find out about the Google pagerank of a website is via the Google toolbar, a small application you can download from the Google site.

Surf's Up

• ILM threads: Pavement ,Classic or Dud? and Tindersticks - supper club tosh? and do you ever feel like you are getting too old to be a music obsessive? (that is a very relevant question for me, that's why I haven't answered yet)
• Beck Entering Studio To Work On Acoustic-Based LP
• Movie on Nick Drake announced: A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake
• Joel on Software - Nothing is as Simple as it Seems. Even apparently simple things like copying a file are complicated tasks for the programmer.
• Is there a website with a Google pagerank 10? (the Google pagerank of a website is a measure of its link popularity and is calculated from the number and importance of websites linking back to it) I found three (backward links): Yahoo (1,020,000), Google (354,000) and Adobe (116,000). Any more? What is with Microsoft which has 136,000 backlinks? It only has pagerank 8. Why? Could it be that most of those backlinks come from Microsoft itself? And that Google does not take interior links into account to calculate the pagerank? Concerning the weblogs my little blog has pagerank 5. The Schockwellenreiter has pagerank 6. Evhead and Metafilter have 7 and Kottke and Slashdot have 8. By the way I did not find a website with a pagerank smaller than 3 (sorry Henner).

Linkage

• Tom Ewing likes the new Lambchop
• Une bibliothèque personnelle sur la toile: Et je tournais ma peine dans mes livres (Lamartine) (via sofa blogger)

I am so tired The new Lambchop album is absolutely gorgeous but I am too tired to write on it now. Tomorrow. I promise. Just some links today:

• Another great music etc. blog by Geoff Parkes: One more cup of Blog for the road - Grumpier by the hour!
• The London Review of Books on William Carlos Williams poetry, my favourite poet of everyday life.
• The Atlantic on Atonement, Ian McEwan's new novel. I really liked his second last book with the wonderful ambiguous title Enduring Love.
• What sleeping postures reveal (via metafilter)
• Floating in cyber space: the man project. This man does exactly what you tell him to do.

• An essay on journal writing: The Journal as Art: "Impossible Text" by Victor Muñoz (via caterina.net)

Potpourri

• David Raposa does not join into the hype on ...Trail of Dead. In the Car he writes on the new Relative Ways EP. After having heard a couple of songs of them I must admit that my interest in them has decreased by close to 100%. "Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen" (literal translation from German:"old wine in new tubes", don't know the idiom in English) again.
• Sounds like a great idea, but I doubt it has a future: a weblog consisting of speech audio files, it is called audioblog (via alvin). Main problem: How do you link from an audio file to a web site, to an image or to another audio file?
• British music etc. blog I missed up to now parallax view. An interesting interview of my favourite music zine from Amsterdam kindamuzik with some members of Lambchop (via parallax view).
• Another indication that most Pitchfork writers do not know apparently have problems to distinguish good from bad music (or should I have said relevant from irrelevant?). The newest Lambchop gets 5.8/10 ("average") from Rob Mitchum. Though he is not very sure of himself:"A small ass-covering caveat: Is a Woman sounds threateningly like a 'grower' album, ...If this is indeed the case, I'm sure I'll soon be run out of Criticsville by a torch-bearing mob, this embarrassingly short-sighted review preserved for all eternity in the Pitchfork archives". More on Lambchop's newest album tomorrow.
• Stevie Nixed on the Strokes/BRMC live. I have to agree 100%. Boards of Canada are much more exciting than those two boring retro bands.
• Giant Sand in New York. The line up at Joe's Pub was like an alt.country supergroup: Besides Howe Gelb, John Convertino and Joey Burns there were Kurt Wagner from Lambchop, Evan Dando from the Lemonheads, Will Oldham from diverse Palace incarnations and Vic Chesnutt. I wish I had been there...
• Pepys project: weblogs and journals by country and region with rating option
• 'What Drug Would You Be' Quiz: shit I was smack.

On repeat today I got hooked by the 5'51'' of We're Computerizing and We Just Don't Need You Anymore, the last track on the American Analog Set's 2001 release Know by Heart. Entangled into thick textures of acoustic guitars, brushed drums, xylophone, hushed vocals and synthetic humming. It felt like a slow descent deeper and deeper into the spiral of the snail-shell of the subconscious. After five minutes when the humming reaches its peak the song halts and turns into an enoesque synthesizer soundscape which fades out very slowly. The end could have been the wonderful start of a new album by My Bloody Valentine. This song is an addictive trip into psychedelic wonderland.

Two members of seminal punk-pop band reunite

• The Guardian on Howard Devoto's and Pete Shelley's first collaboration 25 years after the Buzzcocks' Spinal Scratch EP : "ShelleyDevoto, release an album of 14 determinedly experimental yet melodically infectious electronic pop songs called Buzzkunst"