As I said yesterday, I have been working on a few larger pieces, and that’s really where my time has been spent recently. But I have also been working on a few final structural things. After a few very, very scary moments, I think I finally have things up and running smoothly. Sorry if you visited and a) there was nothing to see, b) every link you clicked on brought you back to the home page, c) the whole layout was different, or d) the sheer weirdness of the page layout left you perplexed. I think – I hope – that it’s all taken care of. In the meantime, hopefully you saw my recent posts:

• Noteworthy, containing links to interesting stories spanning the nether-reaches (a-ha! used that phrase twice, in two days…) of the Internet.
• Listening to Planet Earth, about the very cool new Prince CD.
• Shapes and Sizes, about a song that captivated me last week.

Thanks,

Rick

Yes, the blog has been a little quiet recently. It’s not for wont of cool stories, that’s for sure. Actually, I am working on several larger pieces, so that’s where my time has been spent in the past week or so. But the world doesn’t stop to wait for me, as it turns out, and there have been a few really interesting stories hitting the presses and the blogosphere in the past few days. They include: (more…)

Prince’s recent marketing strategies have been impossible to miss. I wrote about it, it made the news everywhere, bloggers worldwide wrote about it. It’s huge. Turns out that the reviews of the music have been mixed. Pitchfork describes the problem with reviewing a Prince CD thus:

We always expect too much of Prince, because it’s difficult to accept that somebody who made records as astonishing as he did in the 1980s could repeat himself as egregiously as he has for the past 15 years or so. He hasn’t been doing r&b-by-numbers or rock-by-numbers, which is why he gets away with it; he’s just been doing Prince-by-numbers. And yes, he still brings it live. But his albums used to send everyone scrambling to catch up; now they’re self-evidently whatever he deigns to knock out.

Pitchfork was pretty lukewarm on the CD, but I’m digging it. (more…)

Over at Open Your Eyes, a music blog, Peter posted the following (try saying that three times fast):

The Taste In My Mouth – Shapes and Sizes
I don’t know what it is about this song, but it has completely taken over me. It doesn’t even feel like a song, more like a painful memory, haunting away at me. At the three minute mark….those vocals…..simply surreal. I wouldn’t try hard to like it though. Hide it within a playlist and let it eat away at you as it has done to me. If that’s you sort of thing.

Turns out that it wasn’t my sort of thing. Instead I just listened to it then and there. And I was not super impressed at first. But about halfway, before the “simply surreal” vocals, I found myself totally engrossed. And I think I’ve heard the tune maybe 20 times now, just today. It’s beautiful.

The starkness of the production is so barren sounding that when it fills up, it’s…well not really refreshing because the sounds are still sort of chilling. How often to you hear banjo and low brass together? I know, I know, the brass is so “today” what with Bjork filling up Volta with a brass section. And the kora on Volta is really not all that far removed from this banjo, really.

But I digress. The “surreal” vocal section is really quite stunning. But again, it’s the production that knocks me out. The electronica gimmickry going on behind those vocals and throughout are sparse enough to force me to listen closely, but still present enough to be heard.

The clear winner here is the architecture and the ending. The thing builds to a free section. Yes, I said free. Really. Starts out beautiful, quiet, stark, chilling and ends with a free section.

Really.

And the cats can really play the free stuff, too, especially the drummer. Reminds me of Sonny Murray.

If I had to give it a description, you know “like listening to Dali and George Bush have conversation over coffee about nanotechnology” or some nonsense like that, here’s what I would say: Shapes and Sizes occupies a world in which Bjork’s horn section mingle with the end of Wilco’s Poor Places (senza “Yankee…Hotel…Foxtrot…”), under the umbrella of very Decemberists-Crane’s-Wife artwork, and starring a lovely soprano voice singing – initially, at least – about the blood spewing from her cut finger.

Thanks Peter from Open Your Eyes for putting up such a beautiful piece of music. And to Shapes and Sizes in lovely Montreal, way to go.

As of now (July 23, 2007), Shapes and Sizes has 4,065 friends on MySpace.
Artist website: http://www.shapesandsizes.ca/
Artist MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/shapesandsizes

Rick

It’s been a tough week, let me just say that. The two most interesting topics are still: (more…)

Who said that The Decemberists sound like The Church? Well, I did in that first sentence. (more…)

It’s not really news anymore that Paul McCartney put out his newest CD, Memory Almost Full, on Starbucks’ Hear Music record label. The thing that struck me was his quote in the press release. He said:

It’s a new world now and people are thinking of new ways to reach the people. (more…)

It should be pretty obvious by now to those reading my recent posts, to those who know me, and to anyone who is paying attention, Internet radio has been in big trouble in the past few weeks. New royalty rates designed by the copyright royalty board with heavy lobbying from SoundExchange gave Internet radio stations a simple question to answer: Can you afford to continue broadcasting? The answer, as it turned out for many stations was “no.” And to those stations, July 15 was to be D-Day. (more…)

So, VW announced a new arrangement with Wilco, which is great. Moments before I heard about it, my wife sent me a link to this Wilco footage from their new CD, Sky Blue Sky, a tune called You are My Face:

Powered by AOL Video

It rocks. Really. I mean, Wilco has been great for years, but I have to confess my own wishes for more drama in their music. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was fantastic, but I pretty much gravitate to “Poor Places” so I can hear the distortion at the end, and, you know, “Yankee..Hotel…Foxtrot; Yankee…Hotel…Foxtrot…” etc.

But this tune has drama. My first impression was not fair, really. I heard the intro, listened to the bass and thought, “Oh no. It’s a Van Morrison cover.” When the vocals come in, “We were born before the wind” and you’ll know what I mean.

But as soon as the bridge happened, that’s the part with the distorted guitar, I was hooked. The clean sounding guitar line leading up to it has this nice diminished sort of sound, and the changes leading back to the vox (that means, “the chords” leading back…) have that nice V7/II | V7/bII7 | V7 sort of thing. Gotta love it.

Really nice.

Rick

Volkswagon announced today that they have licensed the entire contents of the new Wilco CD, Sky Blue Sky. They claim that this is, “the first time anyone has ever used one album as a soundtrack for an entire TV campaign.” Congrats. I’m hard pressed to think of an example that puts that little fact into question, although let us bow (once again) before Moby for having licensed the entire contents of Play to various and sundry ad campaigns, films and so on. (more…)