damn

It's been a while. So I've been listening to a bunch of stuff recently. I don't exactly remember the last thing I posted about, so I'll go back a bit.

For about a week I listened to Modest Mouse, about 95% of which was from the album Lonesome Crowded West. At first I listened to some of the new albums, then Lauren told me that they were shit, because the singer had lost a bunch of emotion from his voice. I thought that was a bit odd, since all the posts on last.fm were debating about whether or not Modest Mouse had gone emo. Later on I figured out that while the music and melodies had indeed grown more "emo", if we must use the word, Lauren was right and his voice had become pretty boring. Not exactly a good trade-off in my opinion.

Then after that I listened to The Mountain Goats, which was very interesting. The lyrics are pretty intelligent and the songs often allude to figures and events in history. For example, "Sax Rohmer #1" alludes to Sax Rohmer, the writer. Sept 15 1983, which discusses Israel, was the date that Israeli premier Menachem Begin resigned. Babylonian gods, crater lakes, and fictional characters are all included.

After The Mountain Goats I listened to a LOT of Regina Spektor. For about a week straight. Not as intensely as Stars, but you get the idea. I started listening a long time ago, but only really got into it recently. So now I've played Regina 400 some odd times. Which means that according to last.fm She's my second most played artist. Craaaazy. I didn't even realize I was listening that much.

And this week I am on to playing something different. I think this structure of listening to music is better, even though I don't listen to a lot of stuff. One of my biggest complaints about finding new stuff was that I never really got into anything. Well now listening to an artist for a week at a time allows me to become better acquainted with the artists.

It was a pretty hard weekend for me, and The National helped, cause it's so soothing. So then I realized how good The National was, and it's off to a few days of that. Of course it's not going to be religiously like Stars, but a few days of mostly The National can't hurt!