hooray

30 000 tracks scrobbled on last.fm!
what a milestone.
I've been listening a lot to a playlist I put together.
You can look at it here, though you may not be able to listen to it (Last.fm says it's for subscribers only).
I've had music playing almost constantly recently, cause I've been in a sorta shitty mood. I think music is a better remedy than drugs in some cases. Antidepressants I just plain don't agree with unless it's a severe case.

I'm still trying to learn to bend notes on the harmonica. Slow going I guess, but it should be worth it. I think I can get almost a half note bend on some holes, but it's not quite there. I also need to start thinking in terms of music theory, instead of just playing shit.

And fuck I still haven't talked about Of Montreal or Broken Social Scene yet. I just haven't been in the mood to think really.

bands to see live

I've been to a lot of shows that I really liked in the past semester, and some of us have been thinking about which other bands we would like to see.

So here's my list:
Metric
Okkervil River
Portugal. The Man
Sigur Rós
The National
Fleet Foxes
The Decemberists

These are the ones I would definitely go see. Okkervil River has been disappointing in their newer albums, but I think I would still go see them in case they play any of their awesome old stuff. I think Modest Mouse has moved beyond playing anything from Lonesome Crowded West, so I doubt I'd see them.

I am definitely going to see Stars again. Hopefully they'll come close though, so I won't have to be traveling or anything. All the bands I've seen this semester I would see again (Broken Social Scene, Of Montreal, Murder By Death).

Also I'm learning to bend notes on the harmonica. It's not an easy process unfortunately, but it's a necessary one if I'm supposed to become at all proficient.

well

I guess this is the long overdue blog post I've been procrastinating. Now there's just so much stuff idk what to start with. So I'll start where I left off.

The Murder By Death concert. Holy fuck that was a good concert. It was also on my birthday, so that just made it more enjoyable. It's been a long time so the details are a bit hazy, but there were 2 bands that opened for them. One was a rock group with the singer on a piano, that was pretty cool. The other was William Elliot Whitmore I believe, who was also drunk, and kept saying "Fucking A". Anyways Murder By Death was fucking awesome. They've got this amazing cellist who has the coolest cello I've ever seen.
Her cello is just a narrow piece of wood. I guess it's an electric cello, so it doesn't need a resonating chamber. They played a lot of good songs, including Brother and most of the ones I like on Who Will Survive, but they DIDN'T play Killbot 2000. While I was disappointed by that, it was still a very good show. I got myself a Murder By Death shirt and poster, which has a flying turtle on it. It's pretty fucking awesome. (Fucking A!)

What have I been listening to recently? I've listened to quite a bit of Stars, as usual, but I can't really say I've branched out much. Hopefully I'm not getting old. I've also listened to a good deal of The Submarines. I really like the emotional quality of their music: wistful yet upbeat.

On November 20 I traveled back to Tallahassee for the Broken Social Scene concert at The Moon. I'll leave that for another post because I have a lot of picture and video that I want to add in, so I'll have to figure that out first. I found out that Land Of Talk is a very good band, and I've also listened to a lot of that. I'll also talk about them in the next post.


Most recently I've been fiddling with music software. I've previously tried using Songbird for a variety of tasks, such as searching for music or trying to listen to my library, but it was in a beta phase and didn't work for me. They recently released 1.0, and I must say it's worked much better. One of my previous gripes was that all my metadata tags were messed up because Windows Media Player decided to try to fix everything once. Then Songbird decided to freeze while reading the metadata, so my library didn't get organized at all.

I still use Foobar for organization and tagging, because it's just much better at it, but Songbird has nice playlists and it also boasts nice web integration. It has the core of Firefox, so it can browse the web pretty well. Also, it's completely open source, so there should be a lively community building up for it. I've already gotten some extensions for Last.fm support and safer web browsing. It's still in its early stages so we'll see how much I decide to use Songbird in the future. First of all they should implement some of the perks of Foobar, such as the ability to organize the library, and more comprehensive metadata support.

Just very recently I've been listening to a lot of Okkervil River. They're my second most played artist, but I don't listen to them regularly like I do Stars. I listen to them in very large bursts, usually when I've got something bothering me. I love folk music because of the darker content, the wistful feel, and I really do love the banjo. I've already given my views on the banjo, but hell it's such a beautiful instrument.
I'm pretty sure Okkervil River was the first "folky" music that I fell in love with, so I guess they sort of define good Indie Folk for me. Also a lot of their music is written in A major, so I can play along on my harmonica, which complements the music very well. I just need to get better and learn more techniques.

Oh yes and Of Montreal concert on friday. I'm so excited.

Yeah. Broken Social Scene report with pictures and video to come later.

the glaciers made you

and now you're mine. Seriously, listen to that song (Your Rocky Spine, by Great Lake Swimmers). That's another song that I'm going to listen to obsessively, since it's just so amazing. Unfortunately the rest of the album isn't as good, which is disappointing, because I haven't gotten to the rest of the album yet and I would have liked it to be just as good.


Recently I've listened to a lot of more Folk music. I've always listened to some, such as Eisley, Okkervil River, The Decemberists, etc. Recently I've also acquired Fleet Foxes, some Shearwater, The Dodos, Iron & Wine, and now Great Lake Swimmers. I haven't had much opportunity to listen to The Dodos or Shearwater yet, but The Dodos sound good. I never really listened to Folk as a genre, and instead listened to artists individually, but the right kind of Folk (I guess Indie Folk) is actually quality. Folk appeals to me because of the banjos, which I love despite the hillbilly stereotype. In the right settings and the right style the banjo is actually a lovely instrument, having a warm tone and flowing rhythm. It's unfortunate that banjo is only present in more "backwards" genres. Another quality of Folk music that seems to be less prevelant elsewhere is vocal harmony. While other genres tend to put differing melodies together, Fleet Foxes and Eisley harmonize the same melody very well. It might be because harmony is one of the defining qualities of Folk music, though I saw no reference on Wikipedia.


Apart from that, Of Montreal's new album Skeletal Lamping has leaked, though a few days still remain until its official release. Musically it is much more diverse, with a constantly changing sound and style, a lot of which is really fun, like the R&B stuff in St. Exquisite's Confessions. Also Okkervil River released a new album (The Stand Ins), which I completely didn't hear about. It's still inferior to the early albums, but much improved over The Stage Names, which, except for Unless It's Kicks, lacked emotion and basically sucked (ohNOES, Roland is being a pretentious music critic).


I also got a harmonica, partly because I have to bring an instrument to music class on Friday, partly because I've been needing an instrument, and partly because my uncle is pretty baller at harmonica. He's this sorta skinny guy (everyone in Taiwan is skinny) with a huge philosopher beard, he smokes, he's a professor in Taiwan, and he has epic harmonica skills. He also has a really cool harmonica. I don't know if it's just because he's not a parental, but he seems like a really cool guy. I think he also does calligraphy and random philosophical awesomeness. He also told me not to get worked up about my parents. Cool points for him!


I've also ordered a Kalimba, which is similar in layout to a piano, though the mechanism and sound are completely different. The first time I saw it was a video of Architecture In Helsinki, where some guy was just plinking along, looking awesome all the while. When I read about it in some article I recognized it and finally knew what it was called. Anyways this is an instrument of African descent, and it comes with pickups! I'll actually have reason to bust out that amp that I've had under my bed for a while.