Alive with Pleasure.

Okay, this rocks: a video entitled “Alive with Pleasure” by Viva Voce. Great vocals, Guy Maddin cheap effects, a white double-neck guitar, and a story that is funnier upon second watching. Over one year old, but a valuable procrastination tool:

Cave on Letterman.

Interesting video of Nick Cave on Letterman during his Nocturna tour in 1993. Cave is just starting to look old here and he looks like he brought on his own encore.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds-Bring It On(Live)

Primavera.

Spring has not sprung here in Winnipeg, which is featuring -1 degree Celsius temperatures, snow, and the possibility of major flooding due to ice buildup over a seven-month winter.

There’s always a “but” here at Deckchairs, however. The Primavera Sound Festival features some of the most interesting acts around. To be held in Barcelona from May 28 to 30th, if I had a will and a way, I would be there.

Who the heck produced this thing? It’s a work of utter genius. The acts I would love to see include the following (in order):

Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Neil Young, Chad VanGaalen, Kimya Dawson, Spiritualized, Damien Jurado, Plants and Animals, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Black Lips, Andrew Bird, Vaselines, Throwing Muses, Deerhunter, Yo La Tengo, and Shearwater. Ooh, and I love Shearwater.

Nothing.

Nothing, nothing.

Fistful of Love.

It’s interesting to compare the warm hirsuteness of Bonnie “Prince” Billy below to the quietly agony on visual display in Antony and the Johnsons’ Antony Hegarty.

I’m so amazed at the raw, sentimentalized and deeply emotive power of Antony. He’s practically busting out of his body through the tiny voice:

And now that we’ve seen thesis and antithesis, here’s the dialectic: Antony singing with Lou Reed. Two sad, sweet men full of rage and agony singing across the chasm at each other and making that light beautiful:

Ebb Tide.

Since I twigged to Bonnie “Prince” Billy, aka fellow Brown-dude Will Oldham, in the article The Pretender by Kalefa Sanneh, I’ve become slightly more than fascinated in the way he presents himself visually.

The music itself is quite grand but in the most quiet possible way.

To try to explain it, here is a lovely video of him on a beach singing in a hidden track (which I can’t find for some reason) on The Letting Go. Video is directed by Jennifer Parsons.

Request.

It’s been requested that I don’t entirely kill this weblog. So, I’m going to start writing again.

Here’s what I’m going to say today.

First, I didn’t realize that the reason I so much love Elliott Smith and Matthew Sweet and Yoni Wolf (of Why?) and other male artists with sad, ridiculously beautiful vocal chords is because I listened to way too much Alex Chilton and Big Star when I was a teenager. I had no idea how influential he was, despite my reading about his influence for the past 25 years, on both the artists I admire and my internal musical chemistry.

I blame, in the very best of ways, my old friend, V.S., who sent me some Big Star stuff, I believe about a year ago, and which I quickly shelved. I thought I knew that stuff and I guess I don’t or didn’t.

I’m now listening to Third - Sister Lovers, which iTunes calls, quite accurately in turns out, a “shambling wreck of an album.” Every word is true - the album reeks of jealousy, petty madness, total frustration, and utter longing for some place that doesn’t exist. I remember first listening to his “Holocaust,” the seventh song on Sister Lovers, and how grotesquely adequate I felt that description was back at 15 for almost everything. Amazing to realize those cassette tape blues again.

The album really falls apart at the end.

Peaches.

Okay, I saw Juno finally, and it was strong. In large part, it was the acting that carried the good but flawed storyline. In larger part, it was the music, mostly by the Moldy Peaches and friends.

If you don’t believe me, check out this video of the Moldy Peaches, who completely rock and deserve their 15 hours of fame because of their sheer, simple, smart talent:

Yelkrab Slrang.

It turns out that Gnalrs Barkley is giving away its whole album free, backwards and in one continuous track. You can download it from their crazy mini-site. It’s not bad.

Gnarls Barkley.

Everything looks better with Gnarls Barkley’s “Run (I’m a Natural Disaster)” - this was almost impossible to find as, seemingly, NBC has taken crazy steps to keep it off the Net.

This song and everything about it is brilliant.

I’d be surprised if this is video is still around tomorrow.

Caved.

So, Nick Cave’s newish band Grinderman is coming out with a new album called “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” (I love those three exclamation points, by the way.) I’ve been a long-time man fan of Nick Cave, and the new album looks fantastic.

Cool artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster, who were nothing just a few years ago I think, did some of the album artwork. And Graeme Swinton, a rich media / Flash/ other designer, looks like he helped with the video, which, in turn, is great. And below.

The whole thing reeks of bad early 1980s production, Nick Cave looks old and ugly with that caterpillar mustache, and the song seems, as one commentator noted, fresh. It’s really unlike anything else out there right now.

Getting Back.

I don’t know why I think is the one of the most romantic videos ever shot, full of Orientalism, Jewish love, physical tenderness, and plain old endearment. It features David Berman’s Silver Jews singing “I’m Getting Back Into Getting Back Into You” while holding his wife as they walk through Jerusalem’s Arab market.

Oh, and it looks like the same director, Michael Tully is coming out with the Silver Jews movie. Cool.

Nick Cave at 50.

The master, and perhaps the best musical artist on the planet right now, turned 50 today. Happy birthday, Nick.

Elliott Brood.

I saw Elliott Brood today at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. I thought it was one guy but it was three guys with two of them singing, one of them banging away on the backside of his drumsticks and the three of them completely rocking. I thought maybe they were some kind of play on Elliott Smith but they're not - they're the real thing - Canadian rock musik. Part of a new breed folk-rock musicians that sometimes gets labeled "death country," I thought these guys got it - no hillbilly, finger-picking, snot-eating, chicken-drizzling, ho-boy, cowboying country for them. It was a bit like watching the Violent Femmes be all mad at the fact that they were built on country music. Moreover, Elliot Brood was extremely gracious and acknowledged that they were thrilled to be at the Winnipeg Folk Festival and appreciated the huge turnout and support.

The Festival itself rocked as well. I saw a "workshop" of about 7 folkies who ranged in business from folk-satire to falsetto blues and, as always, I kind of fell in love with all of them. The beautifully cool Romi Mayes gave a variegated, traditional performance of a few of her sad-tinged songs of loss and love. Death Vessel's Joel Thibodeau brooded (pun intended) amongst the fanfare of the workshop; but his strange, truthful falsetto voice matches anything by Superchunk's Mac McCaughan. It was the angelic, sublime voice of local girl, Keri McTighe, of Nathan that seemed to capture my sonic brain.

Individual tunes varied in quality but it was a good, strong sampling of the kinds of things folk can and can't do. Actually, folk can do pretty much anything; as my wife said, if it acknowledges its roots in some way, it's kind of folk. Right.

And there's some sadness in all of this as well. Amidst the hubbub and the cheering, the clapping and whooping and calling and sad songs and crazy eyes of the dancing fans and the 31-degree heat beating down on my Tilley'd hat-head, you're only new once. This was my first experience of the Winnipeg Folk Festival and I can only say that once. Things go and things pass and that's it, they're gone. No more. It was my day in the sun.

Nick Cave, Artist.

This is the best interview I've ever seen by an artist, followed by one of the finest songs ever written.

Grinderman.

I got the new Grinderman (aka Nick Cave and a new band) and it's good, but also sad.

I saw Nick Cave in concert in Providence, RI, around 1988, and then again in Boston a few months later. He was incredible then. Just fresh off the Your Funeral, My Trial trail and with a band that included the inimitable Blixa Bargeld on guitar and the brilliant Mick Harvey, the shows were positively electric. Lights blinked on and off, red and yellow and white, pounding drums. Nick Cave commanded the fucking stage, his slicked back hair and lit cigarette flying everwhere. Girls were going mad at these concerts for him and the guys I knew would just die to be him, even for a day. He built his entire character on the backs of Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, William Blake, James Dean and a hundred other romantics, Nick Cave in his thin, black suits and ties just rocked.

Can you tell that I adored him and the Bad Seeds? I did. He told the dirty truth about a dirty world and a dirty mind and, for someone with a poetically romantic bent, Nick Cave bent sinister.

I lived in London in 1990 and I, somehow, got tickets to see him there. That was a truly remarkable concert, part of his The Good Son tour.

Now, with Grinderman, Cave looks old. His eyes are sunken, his hair is thin, his wrinkles are pronounced. He looks like hell - the tobacco and drugs and drink evidently haven taken their toll. And the new songs are desparate, dispairing, grotesque even. One song, "No Pussy Blues," is particularly impactful. There's a bad interview with Cave in Salon that's worth reading, if, for nothing else, getting a sense of where the guy is at, currently (but don't listen to the young, naive interviewer make a fool of himself in front of Cave on the podcast). Here's an excerpt:

Look, when I'm alone and writing there are all sorts of influences -- feminine and masculine influences, memories and ghosts of the past, all that stuff -- having an impact on what I write. With Grinderman, most of it, I'm stuck in a room with four guys in the middle of a fucking monumental midlife crisis. It's a male thing. It's an old man kind of thing. I think there's really something kind of hysterical in the music that's a reflection of that.

Look, Nick Cave is old. He's the musical acknowledgement of our age.

Postscript. Found on YouTube:

Forward.

My friend, R.M., sent this video to me. I have nothing to add, except that it's kind of amusing and the performer is very rehearsed and very talented.

Schizophrenia by Sonic Elders.

This is phenomenal. Young at Heart Chorus sing Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia" from Sister. Kudos to Stephen Walker and the chorus. You can sing along.

And here's the real band doing the song in 2006:

Joanna Newsom.

I'm listening to the aptly named Joanna Newsom sing her crazy songs. Her new album, Ys, borders on total brilliance. Newsom is a harpist and her incredible voice, wavering and pitching and heaving in the waves of her music, sounds like the harp she plays. The songs are orchestrally constructed, full of sweeping violins, plucking chords, and a rare backup chorale. It's almost as if Newsom came down to our unholy earth and blessed us with these tidy morsels of overwrought, delightful Viking lust.

Kind of a cross between Kate Bush, Bjork, Sufjan Stevens, and a range of new music recording artists, the new album is phenomenally produced. Steve Albini, who produced some of my all-time favorite bands (The Pixies, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Superchunk, The Breeders, Fugazi, PJ Harvey and others) also produced one of the tracks on this little masterpiece. Newsom signed with my fave new label, Drag City, and she worked with Jim O'Rourke on the mix. It's a bit of total turtle soup: there's Jews Harp, electric guitar, harpy harp, cymbals, and a cameo of a singer that sounds like Nick Cave (it's Smog's Bill Callahan). The whole thing is just rattling around in my tin brain. It's a rock opera for sad men, a siren call for mermaids, a plaintive cry for long commutes and desperate sonic youth.

Davids.

In Judaism, David is an important, if not critical, figure. David is a warrior, a king of the Jews, a human willing to fight the largest of giants; moreover, he is the precursor to Jesus Christ for Christians and, for Jews, an ancient ancestor of the true messiah, who will arrive one day.

Over the past six months, I've become enamored of three musicians named David. All of them are somewhat kindred spirits, men with beards who crawl through the world they love to see grace and dishonesty more clearly. In their songs, this grace takes on the form of infatuation and uncertainty while the dishonest part comes through knowing that grace is a shadow of utter beauty. The modern world does not allow us too often a glimpse of earth's inherent gloriousness but, when it does, we distrust our own eyes.

David Berman of the Silver Jews is fantastic and untouchable. A founder of the famed band Pavement, I've heard that Stephen Malkmus (the lead singer) pretty much quit Pavement after hearing the album Bright Flight in 2001. Check out the awesome Silver Jews' videos.

My next musical favey Davey is David Bazan. Formerly of Pedro the Lion, his new album, Fewer Moving Parts, is lonely, depressive and glorious. The album contains two, equally great, versions of the same songs: electric and acoustic. He looks like a lunatic at his MySpace page. He'll be playing New York on November 3. I won't be there.

The final David is a secret.

Dylan on Black.

A lot of music has come across the transom lately, not least of which is the video released today by Apple's Bob Dylan. (Dylan came out with Modern Times, his thirty-first album.) Notes on the video:

• The video is filmed in black. It features Bob Dylan, who is in both shadow and silhouette. His guitar is black as is his cowboy wardrobe. It's quite beautiful. And so is the black woman seen dancing in the background.
• The black dancer in the background sports a white iPod that shines brightly against her black dress and skin. It's unclear, to me, why she would be listening to Dylan on an iPod when he's supposed to be only a few feet away playing his guitar.
• Black is the new season's color, all around. Skulls and crossbones abound in high fashion and Apple is charging extra for its new laptops that come in black. Black is the sign of our fascination with our ends (and probably our rear ends).
• I understand Dylan wanting to use black as a kind of character treatment. He's the new Man in Black, again riffing off the very best our musical culture has to offer, most of which came from blacks.
• Dylan wears a black cowboy hat. Real cowboys, the ones who worked in the fields herding cattle and stuff, would never wear a black hat. Not out in the hot prairie sun that I now know so well.
• These days, black hat has taken on new meanings. The Dylan video can't help but point to the technology of the black hats, our new bad guys.
• The video ends with a black screen and a white apple. It's enough to make one buy an iPod.

Oh, it's a really nice video.

Silver Jews.

I've been a big fan of the Jews ever since my friend M.G. gave me a tape of their stuff a lot of years ago. They have a newish album out called Tanglewood Numbers as well as a nice newish video of their song Punks in the Beerlight. The whole thing is one melancholic enterprise, full of hell and high waters, sad tunes set to slow guitars and the droning voice of Jewish David Berman.

It reminds me a lot of depressing things like

• The fact that Amazon.ca really sucks here in Canada
• I probably have a good 15 more really happy summers to go what with my birthday coming up and all
• I don't read no more
• I bought OmniOutliner a few weeks ago and I'm not using it to keep any lists
• I'm not going to buy Yojimbo, though I wrote about it a lot
• There are people that called me a year ago and I haven't returned their calls
• It's become obvious to me that death is pre-birth
• Mail hasn't been getting to me for some reason
• Turin don't matter
• The dictatorship officially began
• The color yellow seems fresh. A clear indication that I'm morose
• The new Belle and Sebastian album is kind of silly in a bad way
• There's a tribute album out for my G-d-favorite artist Elliot Smith. It's sure to be uplifting. I can't listen to it.
• Jeff Chester thinks the Internet as we know it is done because of corporate media consolidation and the need to monetize content that is ostensibly free
• I used to be cute
• It's Thursday and then there's the weekend

Strokes On.

The beautiful boy band The Strokes just put up an amazing little performance on SNL. You'll be able to get to the mpegs pretty soon but for those of you who were on the phone and want to see something pretty fine, you might check out their published video of the same song, Juicebox, number two on the new album, First Impressions of Earth. (Actually, I thought I didn't like Juicebox until I just saw the live version.)

You're Great.

We just got back from NYC and Pennsylvania last night. Ten days. That was nice. I'll write more later.

Tonight, we were in a musical mood and happy to be back in the house. We family-cranked Tigermilk and then danced around the living room. I saw my daughter slowly empty a tin full of paints and glue and bangles and I was wondering what she was doing until she started banging on it. Twenty songs later, I put on the incredibly fine All Around the Kitchen! Crazy Videos & Concert Songs! DVD for our daughter. We watched together the zany Zanes play to a small audience of small people in the big city. It was beautiful as she put her hand on the television and said "You're great, Dan Zanes! You're great!"

Lazy Sunday Ass Rocks

I'm sorry for this bit promotion of an SNL piece called Lazy Sunday but I found it unpredictably and geekily funny.

*Update: This video became (thanks in no small part to Deckchairs and broadband technology) that you can now download Lazy Sunday for free on iTunes. Lazy cool. (Perhaps this is what I like and miss most about New York City - free riffing by smart folks who know their shit and can crack a smile with an attitude.)

Time to Pony Up!

As a recent immigrant to Canada, I'm kind of trying to expose myself to a bunch of new noise that is inherently of and from Canada. Not Leonard Cohen but the new stuff.

So I found this Montreal-based girl band called Pony Up! and they have a few great songs. Very 1980s sounds, of course - a kind of mix of Siouxie and the Banchees, The Pixies, and Throwing Muses, mostly. They have a curvy sound and aren't afraid of using their sexy voices in the name of sex. Kind of sweet, actually.

In other news, I'm massively (again, kind of) reorganizing and redesigning this website. It's going to be a few more days but I promise, it will happen. Perhaps I'll even like writing Deckchairs more. It's become a bit of a drag for some reason, in part because I've been reading so many other, better, more timely or more coherent blogs lately. And perhaps I'm slightly blogged out, though it does appear that I've been doing it a lot longer than most. Perhaps the symptom is the cure.

Additionally, I just downloaded the new Safari browser, along with the recent OS X update, and it does indeed support the Web Standards project's brilliant Acid Test 2. In a nutshell, it means that Safari beat Firefox and Internet Explorer to the punch by supporting many of the most advanced features of Web standards site development.

Meanwhile, Winnipeg is growing on me. It's not without it small-town associations but I'm also realizing that what it lacks in breadth, it makes up for in depth. On Tuesday, the new Millenium (previously the Centennial) library will open after many millions of dollars of investment. A whole new, huge space and 30% more books (open stack) will be a site to see.

Finally, I organized my office, finally. It's not quite perfect, the pictures aren't on the walls yet, and the windows need blinds, but it's the most organized (and largest) office space I've ever had. Jason K. has written one of the most interesting pieces on tidying up that I've seen in some time.

The Dears

Always just slightly a few weeks behind the times, I downloaded from iTunes The Dears new album No Cities Left. It took a couple of listens but it's quite a strong and sophisticated album, except for the occasional dumb-ass lyric. The musical styles purposefully switch, as do the lead singers, but I don't hold it against them any more than I do U2 or other ambitious bands. It's hard to say everything you want to say the way The Strokes do, after all.

The Dears, which perform well at many venues, is a Montreal-based boy-girl band that mix up a range of styles and musiques. Here are the apparently references: Blur, The Smiths, Leonard Cohen, Clash, Godspeed You Black Emperor, TMBG maybe. They were recently nicely featured on NPR and their moodiness, odd orchestrations, and full sound all feel appropriate to these mixed up times. My bet is that Leonard Cohen would like this album quite a bit.

Nothing

There's a great song by The Fugs called "Nothing."

Bad Boy Bands Bug

I've been really trying hard to like some of the "special, new" boy bands out there like The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Keane and Snow Patrol. Each of these dude-groups have a few quirky, interesting songs like Keane's "Somewhere Only We Know." But mostly, and sadly, these folks have pretty limited skill sets as musicians, despite their widespread popularity and alt-fan bases. Like The Bachelorette might say, I really want to like these guys. Too bad they rule and don't rock.

New Music

I've been a consumer of a number of very good and very bad musical titles lately. Today I purchased Pinback's new Summer in Abaddon and without listening to it more than once, I can say it's a superbly rendered and sung album. Influenced by the likes of The Shins and Superchunk, two favorites, the album is sadly forceful, commanding, and while slightly derivative of bands like Modest Mouse, contemporary in all of its alt-pop glory.

I don't love Summer, but it's far better than Killers Hot Fuss, which sounds like it was written to compete with Interpol or at least play on the same stage with them, perhaps during intermission when everyone is smoking outside. Killers is a good name for a band. It's too bad their "domain" name was taken by very average musicians that are riding the wave of 1980s throwback glory. (Oh, I can't wait for the new Interpol and Elliott Smith albums to come hither.)

Wrens

I bought the Wrens' Meadowlands album because the cover is cool and because a massive 49 reviewers on Amazon gave the album an average of 4.5 stars. Also because "Customers who bought this title also bought: Broken Social Scene, The Shins, Sufjan Stevens, Death Cab for Cutie, Decembrists, Franz Ferdinand, Modest Mouse, and Walkmen." Why else would I buy it?

I'm pretty into this little album, by a bunch of guys from New Jersey. Their influences are many, and the album builds in that the each tightly written song on the list is better than the next one. The entirety is accomplished but I mostly appreciate the odd sonic surprises throughout, mostly during a song's bridge.

Bands seem more heavily influenced by other bands than ever before. Here are Wrens' recognizable influences:

• The Pixies
• Lush
• My Bloody Valentine
• Flaming Lips
• The Vines
• The Strokes
• Grandaddy

Music Plasmosis

Every so often there's a little surprise out there on the Web, this time it being musicplasma, a superfine Flash-based interface that takes any band and maps out the most minor and most recognized relationships. I typed in "Trail of Dead" and it noted that The Postal Service, Interpol, and Broken Social Scene are in the mix (as they indeed are for me) but on the outskirts are Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, TV on the Radio and Deftones (who are not).

The interface is most likely based on Thinkmap's far more robust and supremely elegant Visual Thesaurus, a product which I was invited to work on in 2001 but turned down for a variety of reasons. (Thinkmap used to be Plumb Design, an innovative web development company located a few blocks from the World Trade Center). Long before Thinkmap was a fascinating "knowledge" interface called The Brain, which I used in one of the first sites I developed back in 1998. The Brain was started by Harlan Hugh, whom I also met; Harlan never sought to support his product on the Mac and he's still true to form -- the whole applet falls apart in Safari.

In any case, it's good to see that the spirit of visual relationship mapping has a few feet and I'm sure that many government agencies are trying this technology to study terrorist subjects.

Will Come To Me

The new Wilco album is finally here in my G4 tray and I can't tell if this album, A Ghost Is Born, is ghastly or ghostly.

It feels like the band, for whom I have great respect as the inheritors of Radio(head) alt-rock, wrote up 12 songs that were substantial and melody-driven. They then took each and every song, pared down the beats, the melodies, the vocals, the content, and the cream of each one and then made a recording. I can't tell what the hell happened with these guys as they colored everything gray and white, including the album cover itself.

The White Rap

I downloaded the new Beastie Boys album, To The 5 Boroughs, off iTunes today and it's quite good for a bunch of older, Jewish, white men. I of course mean that as a compliment.

The album is relatively heartfelt and does aim to please the folks who have it tough in New York City since 9/11, which is probably 2/3 of the population here. But the beats sound like they came off a tin can and only a few of the rhythms feel very original. Mostly, the lyrics are righteous which is how the B-Boys always have been. I need to listen to the album a few more times before making a more final verdict, but the album comes off as new-ish.

I didn't mention that I accidentally downloaded the CLEAN version of the album. My dumb. Gee, could this possibly effect the above perspective?

Finally, I like the cover art a lot. It's a flat-out fine drawing by the otherwise average illustrator Matteo Pericoli.

Son of God

As I noted a few days ago, I've become a big fan of Sufjan Stevens. When the album came to me, I put the music on and was immediately fascinated -- it's a perfected combination of many Elephant 6 bands, my favorite of which is The Music Tapes. A few minutes into listening to Sufjan, my wife realized that the album is replete with Born Again lyrics, which surprised me and astounded me because it's so unacceptable for truly religious lyrics to be part of contemporary "alternative" music. I'm not a believer in Christ but I believe in this artist, perhaps the son of the late Elliot Smith.

Sufjan Stevens

About one week ago, I was at a used/new children's bookstore and heard the dulcet, torrid sounds of Sufjan Stevens who sounds a bit like he met Neutral Milk Hotel on a strange night in the middle of a rough-and-tumble Michigan bar. That probably doesn't do justice to his music, which is plaintive, solemn, and surrendering - a bit like Steven Merrit but more down-home, more straight for lack of a better word. You can purchase his music on Amazon, but you might as well buy the goods for $12.00 each, postage paid, on the SoundsFamilyre label site.

I listened to the Magnetic Fields' new album in the car this weekend and was moved almost to tears by the last song on the album, It's Only Time, on which Merrit cries "Marry Me, Marry Me" with a warble in his voice that defies gravity.

Magnetism

I downloaded via iTunes the new Magnetic Fields' I. Here's my review:

• I adore "I."
• "I" is Cole Porter wrapped in John Cash and covered in the sexual melting pot of Morrissey and Modest Mouse.
• "I" puts the lie to the death of AOR.
• "I" is a coherent, sad, and ultimately guilty explication of what happens when a person loves falling out of love with someone.
• "I" is somehow timely yet impotent in the face of gay legal marriage.
• The Magnetic Fields has a very fine website which also houses info about sister/brother bands Future Bible Heroes, The 6ths, and The Gothic Archies.

Love

Add more thing to the list:

Adobe InDesign 2.0.2 is not working. I guess that means that I'll need to fork over another $169.95 for the upgrade.

I'd rather just sit in the front of the computer and listen to the new Courtney Love which is very good. It's nowhere as powerful or inspiring as her first few albums but there's little question that this woman feels and feels messed up.

E.S. P.S.

In my haunted quest to own every album of the late Elliott Smith, I acquired his Roman Candle and Mic City Sons, the latter of which is technically by Heatmiser, his 1996 Portland band. Both are pretty great after about 30 listens each.

That skating guitar plucking, melancholic, gravel-up and gravel-down voice, and troubador melodies appear throughout both albums. I was wondering when Spin would cover this artist's life and they do so in this months' issue. And, if you're a fan, take a look at Amazon.com's special feature on Smith, replete with a rare interview and live tracks. Caution: The hated RealAudio Player is needed to listen to these. And here is one of his last interviews ever.

2003 Stands

The year ends with a repeat entry, two albums that have paved their music into my head. Though these albums were not released in 2003, they were for me, sadly. And here they stand as inspiration for a new year, a new realm of the possible, a new space of the marvelous in its infinite beauty:

Elliott Smith, Either/Or

and

Elliott Smith, Figure 8.

Best Albums of 2003, Part I

It's time that I compiled, today and tomorrow, the best records of 2003, with handy-dandy links attached to each one. I listed to a lot of music this year, in part thanks to iTunes. I'm very aware that my taste in music has been super-conditioned by popular alternative opinion, but so be it -- I stand 100% behind these recommendations.

The following is in no particular order because music, to me, doesn't fit nicely in groups. Here is Part 1 of 2, however:

Lucinda Williams, World Without Tears
Soulful conjunctions of beautiful singing in various country-like styles

Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head
Smartly written melodies

Be Good Tanyas, Chinatown
Beautiful Canadian soulful, southern music

The Strokes, Room on Fire
Overplayed but not overestimated, these young men are truly talented musicians

Lost in Translation, Kevin Shields and others
Beautiful, nonstop music lead by one of hte most important musicians of the 1990s

New Pornographers, Electric Version
Sweet harmonies that takes a long time to truly enjoy

The White Stripes, Elephant
Too smart, too cool, and too good not to play over and over again

Doves, The Last Broadcast
A surprising and ethereal album, with catchy strumming and fine lyrics

Interpol, Turn On the Bright Lights
A new old-time favorite, they sound better every time I hear them

The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow
Not unlike the other new "The" bands like The Vines, but better

Belle and Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress
Hated the first listen, swooned during the second, laughed during the third

Stephen Malkmus, Pig Lib
Well-written redux solo act by Pavement funnyman and great song-writer

Better and Brown

I'm amazed that the more I listen to Elliot Smith's albums such as Either/Or, the more I'm astounded at his range of talents, depth of feeling, and melodic smarts. I can't get enough of the piercing truths popping out of that guitars of his.

His songs are colored in ranges of brown -- goldwatch-brown, sunset-brown, tobacco-brown, bloodstained-brown, shit-brown, oldwoodencoin-brown, sweetdirtsmell-brown.

I'm a bit ashamed that I had many of his albums in my collection for a long time, that I wasn't impressed, and that, only after he died, did I become a massive fan.

Strokes

I picked up the new Strokes album and I'm disappointed. Not in the Strokes or in the music or in the originality of the tunes but in myself. See, I downloaded the album from Apple's iTunes which I thought was the coolest thing since swiss bread, as I was dying to get my hands on the album and there's nothing like getting it over the Net legally. But here's the problem: I miss the album art. Sure, the music art's gotten smaller and smaller over the past ten years - from LP to casssette to CD to a small icon in the bottom left of your MP3 player tray on your desktop. But I really want to see what they come up with visually to complement the album. I want to know what array of visual arcania the Strokes decided to put together to help us make sense of the tunes and they're connection to us. And I won't have that chance as the album is now burned on a boring, plain, 50-cent Sony CD-ROM, which, I might say, sounds quite delicious.

Moby, Michael, Mark and Missy

I haven't checked Apple's iTunes in a few weeks, in part because there is so very little to choose from. I mean, I don't want to download the new Rod Stewart or Eagles albums, both of which are top-featured on their iTunes home page. BUT, what I find most interesting and innovative now is their Celebrity Playlists, which are basically mix tapes, set up and refined by folks like Moby, Michael Stipe, Mark Ronson, and Missy Elliott. The songs these artists pick and choose is as interesting as any other person's and the cost is rather prohibitive -- Mr. Stipe's 31 songs costs $30.69. But one doesn't have to purchase the entrie list and can simply "sample" the music on display. The extravagance of posting for-sale mixed playlists on the web does more damage, however, to the idea of the LP, the album-as-art, and the probability that records as we know them will be around five years hence.