#7 Godspeed You Black Emperor!: Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven! (80) Music to be listened to on headphones with hardly any lights on. It starts very calm and slowly and builds up to climax in a cacophony of sound. I think Godspeed who are from Quebec have eight members, they play some classical instruments like violins, french horn, but also drums (2) and guitars and are a collective in the sense that no member is privileged. There are no lyrics except recorded statements of people (love the old man remembering Coney Island). The music is almost symphonic and closer to classical than pop music. posted by Alexander Fritz at 10:00 PM
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#6 <a href="http://www.tbstars.co.uk/"><b>Trembling Blue Stars</b></a>: <a href="http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists/tremblingbluestars/brokenbywhispers"><b>Broken by Whispers</b></a> (70)<br>Robert Wratten used to be the head of the late 80s/beginning 90s British band <a href="http://www.maths.monash.edu.au/~rjh/fm/"><b>The Field Mice</b></a>. I think they are the most underrated band of the last 10 years. They are something like the missing link between <a href="http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~moz/"><b>The Smiths</b></a> and <b><a href="http://www.belleandsebastian.co.uk/">Belle and Sebastian</a></b>. Melancholic very tuneful pop which only the English are able to create. The Trembling Blue Stars is more or less his solo project. Their third album is their best. Robert seems a little out-of-place still lamenting about an old love story (the female singer of the Field Mice) in his mid-thirties. He is something like the never growing-up adolescent.
The biggest torture At I Love Music a thread titled Used to love it, had to kill it gets going. It is about a theme I already touched before when writing about best of lists and the last REM. It concerns the problem that certain albums one used to love in the past can become unlistenable one day. It happened to me with many albums e.g. Out of Time by REM, Grace by Jeff Buckley, most albums by King Crimson, Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, Freedom by Neil Young etc. I think the problem is quite easy. If you love a record in the beginning you listen to it as many times as possibles. One day the record is exhausted. Your feeling towards the music changes from love and veneration to hate and contempt. So it is much better not to love a record too much in the beginning and let it grow slowly. But this is a kind of paradoxon. Who would buy a record he does not like from the start? So actually you should try to find records you think you might love in the future. That is a little bit like buying shares on the stock market. You have to forecast the future. But instead of prophesying what other people will do as on the stock market you have to forecast your own future taste which seems to be much more difficult I guess. When thinking about this from another angle I can think of an almost devilish idea how to torment people. You ask them what their all-time favourite piece of music is (some answers are here) and then you play it to them 24 hours a day. After a short while they will suffer as you will have destroyed their favourite music and they will become crazy listening to it again and again. This works not only with music but with everything people love. If you force them to do what they like, be it eating sweets, having sex, drinking cocktails or/and lying in the sun they will quickly start to hate what they considered a pleasure before and will feel oppressed. So I finish this with a nice ending. The most valuable good for a man is his liberty to do what he wants without others dictating him what to do. But it is also his fate when it comes to buying records...
My favourite chess variant Originally I wanted to write something about the Dortmund tournament with all big names except Kasparov participating. But it is too much hassle to replay grandmaster games. And it is quite boring usually especially when Kramnik leads. Maybe when the tournament is over I will comment on it. For now I would like to explain Touch and Move or Touche Bouge as we called it in French when we played it in Luxembourg. We met once per week in a pub and in the beginning we only had one chessboard. But after a while three or four people came and we invented this variant which is not mentioned on the chess variants page. It is two against two. In each team one person touches the piece which should be moved and the other one moves the touched piece. That is all. I really fell in love with this simple adaptation for four people. Suddenly chess becomes a social game. It is not only brain against brain but the connection of two brains against two brains. Almost a network game. Of course the person who touches decides on the main direction of the game. The mover only executes and tries to read the mind of the toucher. When there were mixed teams usually the male touched and the female moved (no offense intended). I really would have liked the idea of playing with my girl-friend in one team. Unfortunately I was on my own at that time. The games usually do not develop as logical and smooth as normal games but they can still be quite interesting. What I also like about this is that it was born out of poverty, out of scarcity. In German we say Not macht erfinderisch ( necessity is the mother of invention). That is one of the few cases where German is much shorter than English.
Top Ten 2000 continued
#8 Johnny Cash: Solitary Man (American III) (72) I always hated country music and especially Johnny Cash. With this album Johnny Cash rehabilitates himself. Cash sounds like someone who has survived a short stay in his own coffin. You can hear that he has won a battle against death, his voice is even more masculine than usually (Solitary Man by Neil Diamond). The songs are a good mix of his own and some very good covers. Those include One from U2 (better than the original as Cash lacks the affectations of the false prophet Bono), a very intensive rendering of The Mercy Seat by Nick Cave and one song by Will Oldham who accompanies Cash. The simplicity of this music (you basically listen to an acoustic guitar plus Cash's voice) makes it so strong.
Austria rules (DE) Vielleicht nicht der richtige Titel. Man könnte das falsch verstehen (grab in der Geschichte). Nichtsdestotrotz: Der Sofa Blogger Peter Praschl hat mich aufgestöbert. Und zitiert sogar aus meinem Vergleich von Wein und Musik. Vielen Dank Peter, auch wenn Du mein Blog gut findest, so nehme ich mir doch die Freiheit heraus, Deins auch phantastisch zu finden. Sonst hätte ich Dich ja nicht gelinkt.:) Sehe gerade, dass Du mich weder unter [Watch], noch [Like] und natürlich nicht unter [Miss] einsortiert hast, sondern unter [Love] (versinke im Boden vor Scham und Stolz).
Age Moments in Love commented today on Youth Decay on Sleater Kinney's last album All Hands on the Bad One (a smashing 81/100 score by the critics, I thought it was ok, but nothing special). It reminded me of something I almost forgot. It is my birthday today. 38. The numbers get weirder and weirder. I have not yet been accustomed to that figure. I liked 37 as three times 37 is 111, a Schnapszahl as we call it. Before I liked 32 because of 32 bit processing. It is strange with birthdays. The first ones you do not even realize. Between 5 and 18 you are really keen to get one year older. Then between 19 and 29 you do not really care anymore for birthdays. From 30 to 36 or something I was afraid of my birthday. I did not want to become older, become an old grown-up. But from the last birthday on I am back to my twenties. I do not care anymore. What is age? It is about the only thing you get for free in this world (except its consumption, i.e. death of course). So I have also asked myself the question why I still buy at least two indie rock cd's per week like a teenager or twenty-something. Maybe I am still catching up as I only started serious record buying in 1991. Before it was mainly books. Maybe it makes me younger. Whatever. See you tomorrow. Now I have to take care of the guests.
Another blogger reads me Concerning the link business I must thank Phil from Eyes that Can See in the Dark for linking back to me yesterday. I feel almost ashamed about his compliment. And I envy the clever name of his blog so much. Mine on the other hand is so trivial, so idle, so obvious. But it can be interpreted in many ways. It is called s.a.s. as I never write about those two themes (not really but I try to at least). Or the most important things in life (without one of those two there wouldn't be any) are s.a.s. but there is more to life and that is music. Or the truth: I would have killed myself long ago if there would not be s.a.s. in my life. I would feel like a castrated Eskimo in winter. Coming back to Phil's blog I guess I found it via Josh blog. And it is a very good read. We share a similar taste of music (with exceptions, Ivan Rebroff does not belong to my favourite singers). I just listened to the mp3 Phil posted July 11th which is a collaboration with his friend Scott. A very nice guitar instrumental with some synthesizer, makes me think of new age a little bit, which is not bad. There was this guy Georg Deuter (sorry this is German), who followed the Bhagwan to Poona in India in the late seventies/early eighties, he made similar meditative music.
Top Ten 2000 #10 Neil Young: Silver and Gold Neil's best effort since Ragged Glory ten years ago. But this time it is Neil's soft side again. If there is a worthy sequel to Harvest it will be Silver and Gold (metascore 65/100) and not this mediocre and kitschy Harvest Moon. Even if the best tune Razor Love is from 1987 Neil is back again with 55 years. There is hardly a bad track, Neil is playing mouth harp like 30 years ago, sometimes the steel guitar brings us quite close to country. The album is very tranquil and serene, a typical later works of someone who has experienced the worst and the best. It is a little bit like Faust II (DE). I can imagine Neil as Philemon and his wife as Baucis sitting in the garden and enjoying the soft sun rays of indian summer.
Top Ten 2000 #9 Lambchop: Nixon (metascore 72) The most heart-warming album in 2000. I imagine Kurt Wagner sitting in the middle of his 12 person orchestra (saw them live). Kurt's voice is sometimes slightly annoying (when it is high-pitch) but the instrumental part makes up for it. You can hear that this music comes from people who really love music. It has rich melodies and is sometimes swinging (Grumpus). To be heard in late autumn nights. The title of the album was politically quite anticipatory but it would probably have sold much better would it have been called Dubya. P.S. Kurt Wagner metRichard Brautigan the author of Trout Fishing in America and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (my favourite) just before he died. Brautigan died like Kerouac. Totally drunk all the time, with no friend left.
Top Ten Albums 2000 (stand-out tracks in brackets) - Giant Sand: Chore of Enchantment (4, 12, 16; 3; 2, 8; 1, 9; 11) - Yo La Tengo: And then Nothing Turned Itself inside-out (4, 13; 6, 12; 8, 10)) - Mann, Aimee: Bachelor No. 2 (1, 3, 7, 9; 5) - Montgolfier Brothers: Seventeen Stars (2, 8; 9; 3) - Adams, Ryan: Heartbreaker (2; 7, 9) - Trembling Blue Stars: Broken by Whispers (1, 2, 3, 5) - Godspeed You Black Emperor!: Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (9; 10; 6, 12; 1) - Cash, Johnny: American III: Solitary Man (4; 2, 7; 1) - Lambchop: Nixon (2; 1) - Young, Neil: Silver and Gold (9; 5, 6; 1)
Honorable mentions: - Louise Attaque: Comme On A Dit (2) - Goldfrapp: Felt Mountain (8; 3) - Harvey, Polly Jean: Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (9)
And thank you so much to Absintheur's Journal who has not only got an amazingly good musical taste but is also generous enough to link back to me. He is a big fan of Wedding Present'sSeamonsters (tom e. - ned r.) of 1991, one of my favourite rock albums of the 90's. And his writing is quite prolific.
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