Lil Tijuana, Theme From Regret:

White Boy Funk, Too Funky, A newish Song:

Great Loss:

Un Sueno:

This show.

What kinda of metal?  Why, gold, of course!

The dressing room

Metal Dog! Look at the Camera!

She doesn't have a very metal expression, but she's still pretty metal.

A List of Miraculous Things, as defined by the Insane Clown Posse…  (If this list doesn’t make any sense to you, consider yourself lucky;  I will not be embedding an explanatory video.)

Mountains
Hot lava
Dirt
Magnets
Fire
Air
Music
Everything you believed in during childhood
Giraffes
Pet Cats
Dogs
Crows
Marine Life (generally)
Pelican eating habits (especially including inappropriate sources for nourishment, eg a cell phone.)
Insect Metamorphosis (esp. in butterflies)
Childbirth (generally)
Children who look like their parents
Eighty-five thousand people in one room (feat of engineering?  unsure…)
Fifteen thousand Juggalos*
Ghosts
Trees
Germination
Stars (generally)
The Sun (specifically)
The Milky Way
The Moon
Mars
Shooting Stars
UFOs
Solar Eclipses
Water (generally)
Oceans
The Seven Seas
Rivers
Niagara Falls
The Midnight Coast (?)
Weather (generally)
Snow
Rain
Rainbows (after it rains)
Fog

*Admittedly, this figure does strike me as miraculous.

It’s not my fault, but I went on a bonkers buying binge this week. I had a gift certificate to Reckless, so I figured… why not spend it and another forty bucks on top of it? (Answer: cause that’s stupid.) Anyhow, it’s not even entirely my fault.

First to blame: The AV Club, whose most recent Inventory feature resulted in this:

Then, I’d been constantly hassled by Nathan, Grant, and..  basically the rest of the world to get these, and if I’m one thing it’s a sucker for peer pressure.

These last two, unfortnately, are just my fault.  (Though a case could be made that it’s the fault of listening to Sirius and/or XM at the coffee shop I went to last week.  It was definitely on the “college” channel.)

I still have a pretty sizable list of stuff on the “to buy ASAP” list, but I’m pretty sure the next purchase is going to be Lady Gaga, cause she deserves it.  I’m also pretty sure it’s going to be awhile before I go record shopping again, cause it’s going to take a long time to work through all this.

I’ve listened to everything all the way through once, and my initial impressions are after the break.

(more…)

Wait for it…  Wait for it…

Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve made a legit post.  Sorry, that’s lame.  I’ve been doing a lot of work on the house, including my big move from the second floor to the “garden” unit.  I’m about to redo all the electric on the second floor, then I’ll give it a good, neutral paint job and a brand new kitchen.  So I’ll probably have some home-improvement posts in the next couple weeks.  When I get back from the gym today, I’ll clean up my apartment and put up a little tour video of the new digs.  Anyhow, there’s a few things that I would normally actually write about, but I’m just going to.. .  I don’t know.  mention them.

Music- St. Vincent’s new album, Actor, is awesome.  None of the tracks get em as stoked as “Marry Me John” but the album is fantastic.  Also fantastic, the Bill Callahan record Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle is really great too.  I picked up Numero Group’s fourth Eccentric Soul comp featuring Detroit’s Big Mack label.  Like all in the Eccentric Soul series, this record is fantastic.  Those Numero Group folks really know what’s what.  The Mint Chicks Screens is growing on me.

This person is a dummy, though I’m stoked to see the Senate apparently includes a 12-year old girl. This person is awesome, especially the last week from Iraq, and especially especially when he’s trying to train the cutest puppy on the planet to not eat ice cream. (Go to 3:10 for the actually funny part to begin.):

The Slide was a good book, especially if you’ve got any sort of vaguely positive or negative feelings for St. Louis, the Cardinals, Baseball, or having graduated college.

Okay, that’s it for now.  I gotta go to the gym, go to Target, go to the post office.  Wanna know how many Clif bars you can fit into an APO/FPO flat rate box?   Like 60!  Crazy!  And that’s not even taking them out of their box.  I bet I could cram in even more.

Congratulations to me for getting back from Baltimore.  What a cool place.

The best part about getting home?  Possibly that my brother bought me a (full) bottle of tequila in excahnge for having finished the (nearly empty) bottle of tequila I had before I left.  But more likely the best part about getting was that the new Mint Chicks cd that I ordered finally came.

Screens.  I can’t remember if it was last summer or the summer before tht I first started listening to the Mint Chicks…  (I just looked it up.  It was two years ago in March.)  When I first heard them, I went all over the place trying to track down all the cds, eps, 7″s, 10″, etc. that I could.  Within a month, I had everything they’d released (save one 7″ that I still can’t find) so it was pretty exciting to have a new record to get.    I’m sure a lot of fans felt the same way- even though I did all my discovering in an intense three week period, it’s still been like 2.5 years since the last record came out.

I think the jury is still out on Screens.  They’ve always been a synth-friendly pop band, but this record takes the “-friendly” suffix away, kind of like how Devo started, and then kind of like how Devo kept going.  Which is fine, but at my heart I’m still pretty much a guitar rock dude, though maybe that’s slowly changing.  It’s slower than the previous record- even the fastest songs aren’t close to the frenetic pace that was common on prior releases.  None of the individual tracks immediately stand out the way “Crazy Yes Dumb No” or “Walking Off a Cliff Again” did on the previous record, but “Don’t Sell Your Brain Out Baby” comes close: 

 They remind me a lot of Hooray For Earth on this record, which probably doesn’t mean much to many people, but so it goes.  How about a slightly more mellow Cripples?  Still no?  I don’t know.  I’ve got to make a fairly long drive this afternoon, so I’ll be able to listen to the record a handful of times.  (At 30 minutes, it’s their shortest full-length record.)  I think blasting it in the car will be a good listening experience, certainly better than while on the treadmill at the gym and sitting in front of the computer.   It hasn’t yet been released in the US, I don’t think.  You can’t find it on iTunes, and it’s crazy expensive on Amazon, if they even have it in stock, but hopefully that situation will change soon. I can’t recommend spending the 30 bucks or whatever it would currently cost, but maybe the record will grow on me… We’ll see.

@Ottobar, Baltimore MD