Another item in which I make notes to myself, or make random short 
comments which don't seem to merit their own item.  The previous incarnation
of my item was item:music3,25  (music3 conference, item 25)
  
This style of item was introduced to the conference by Mark Ziemba
and I'd like a few more of the regulars to try running such an item
themselves.

30 responses total.

I finally had reason to play around a bit with iTunes.  I had to
install it for work yesterday.  (Yeah, work, that's the ticket!)

Seriously, I had to investigate claims by another vendor that iTunes
networking was going to interfere with a PC-based network product my
office is rolling out for its users.  (It doesn't interfere.)

So once I had iTunes on the PC, I sniffed around the iTunes Store a
bit and decided that it was Not Awful.  I can see how a bad 
iTunes shopping addiction could develop.

I have had this vague fantasy for a while that every month I would buy
a compilation-CD-worth of good current rock songs.  Right now I feel
like there are few if any rock bands where I am willing to listen to
an entire album of their work.

The problem is, I don't know what to use for an input list.
I can pick up a few performers I saw on Letterman (The Decemberists,
Tilly and the Wall).  Bob Lefsetz just pointed to Al Kooper's list of
50 good current songs, and I might dabble a few from there.  And
there's always BBC Radio 6, the serious rock station.

Eventually of course I will have to acquire an iPod.  My current MP3
players are all CD based.  I know, very well, that I can't play
Apple's AAC/Fairplay format on my existing MP3 players; I will have to
convert the files to old-fashioned CD Audio.

(Mike, you had one or two specific Decemberists songs to suggest to me?)

Hmmm..  Some Decemberists track recommendations for Ken...

 I believe you'd like "The Chimbley Sweep" from their second album,
 "Her Majesty.."

 I think you'd also like the topical satire of "Sixteen Military Wives",
 the single from their third album ("Picaresque").

 I prefer their first album, and from that I'd recommend (in rough order
 of preference) "Leslie Anne Levine", "July! July", "Here I Dreamt I Was
 an Architect", or "California One Youth and Beauty Brigade."

What kind of current rock songs are you looking for, ken?

Stuff with electric guitars and halfway decent singing?  :)

Various popular reference points in my past would include R.E.M, Jefferson 
Airplane, the first Television album, Patti Smith, Led Zepplin albums
II & IV, the hits from Cream and the Rolling Stones, early Neil Young.

Anything resembling rock with traditional/roots influence can usually get 
at least a moment or two of interest out of me.  

Among rock music from the 21st century, the only things to stick with
me so far are The White Stripes (who are channelling the year 1974)
and "I Predict A Riot" by the Kaiser Chiefs, who I heard on BBC Radio 6.

 What did you think (if anything) about Franz Ferdinand?  I thought
 their eponymous debut from a few years ago was extremely catchy,
 hook-filled pop.  Try the track "The Dark of the Matinee" for a
 good idea what the rest of their songs sound like.

 If you like them, you might like the (even more) tongue-in-cheek
 act Art Brut -- check out their single "Formed a Band."

 The Shins are very uneven in their output but I loved their 2001
 single "New Slang" (also on the LP "Oh, Inverted World")  Not sure
 it's your cup of tea, but I thought it was great..

 And as long as I'm throwing out semi-random recommendations from
 pop/rock acts from the past several years, did you manage to miss
 the Flaming Lips' excellent 2002 album "Yoshimi Battles the Pink
 Robots"?  If so, check out tracks 1 ("Fight Test"), 2 ("One More
 Robot / Sympathy 3000-21"), and 8 ("It's Summertime").

 Also from a few years back, I very much liked Beck's downbeat album
 "Sea Change", which strips off the funk flourishes and sound effects
 for a much more straightforward album of post-breakup songs.  Check
 out the lovely opening track "The Golden Age" (reminiscent of the
 Stones' "Wild Horses" in its guitar intro) and "Lost Cause" and
 "Already Dead", full of rich depressing goodness..

That's funny. I was going to suggest some Beck as well, and Lost Cause was 
one of the ones I thought of because of the electonic-folkie vibe. 

I would add Tyrannasaurus Hives for its unique Swedish punk take on rock 
music from the 60s forward. It's clear from their musical "quotes" that 
they listened to some excellent non-Swedish music when they were younger. 
It's kind of fun to pick out the parts like "oh, now he's doing Iggy, now 
he's doing Jagger, now he's doing McCartney." And the band grooves on 
sounds from the English Beat, to the Pixies, to the Clash. There's one 
tasteful whole tone guitar solo on the entire album, so there's no real 
guitar heroics, just a lot of cool cranked Fender guitar riffs.

And of course I have to put in a plug for my current fave, Betty 
Blowtorch. The lead singer has one of the most powerful rock voices I've 
ever heard, a cross between Chrissie Hynde and Courtney Love, with lyrics 
that occasionally approach Patty Smith's level (the rest tend to be 
X-rated). For their most polished studio stuff, check out Love/Hate and 
I'm Ugly and I Don't Know Why off the Are You Man Enough? CD. For a rawer 
punk/pop sound, check out Dresses and I Wanna Be On Epitath, a musical 
parody of the Epitath "sound" on the Last Call CD. And for three minutes 
of the most harrowing, pure, raw emotion that matches Patti Smith's 
finest, check out Get Off, also on the Last Call CD (or the Get Off EP if 
you can find it). It's in 14/8 time and it's the singer's autobiographical 
song about being repeatedly raped by her stepfather. As with all their 
songs, the musicianship is outstanding. It's also very refreshing to hear 
four women who refused to go the Go-Go's route. And if you want guitar 
heroics, the lead player can wail.

Thanks for the recommendations, keep 'em coming.

I listened to the bitty little previews on Amazon for both Art Brut
(Mike's recommendation) and the Hives (cyklone's), and I'm afraid 
both of those songs encapsulate quite precisely what I don't want to 
hear in today's rock singing.   Could we PLEASE have Joey Ramone 
or Patti Smith as a minimal standard of tunefulness?  :)

Beck goes into the playlist, either for "Lost Cause" or "The Golden Age."
Or maybe both, if it's a short programme on the CD.

Leslie wants me to get a track by The Killers.

Here's some suggestions for me from the Al Kooper Top 50 of 2006.
I have not heard any of these yet.
 
http://www.alkooper.com/#TopFifty

1. If Only The Moon Were Up 3:02 Field Music
5. Brother 3:52 Dark New Day
11. Out the Door 3:04 Who Made Who
28. Mr. High & Mighty 5:33 Gov't Mule

(and a few folky choices that I won't mention here)

Decemberists:  "July, July" and "The Chimbley Sweep" are in.

Betty Blowtorch is also on iTunes if you want good vocals. Just start with
the ones I suggested or you may end up with one of their X-rated rants. But
hey, at least mcnally and I scored well with Lost Cause.

And after reading Ken's comments, I have to modify my BB recommendations. If
you're looking for Ramones style vocals, check out Party til Ya' Puke for an
excellent Ramones-style tune with great vocals. It's on the Last Call CD.
Imagine a female equivalent and you'll have it. After reading your comments,
I'd delete my recommendation for I Wanna Be on Epitath. It's too much of an
inside joke in a genre you probably dont' know about.

Just a few more suggestions for Ken:

One of my favourite indie rock bands at the moment is Spoon. As usual, I'm
behind the times and haven't really heard their newest discs. I love 2001's
GIRLS CAN TELL, and 2002's KILL THE MOONLIGHT. A few of my favourite songs
from these --- "Everything Hits at Once" & "The Fitted Shirt" & "The Way We
Get By". In the same indie rock vein, you might like Neutral Milk Hotel or
Guided By Voices. Have you ever heard The Beta Band's song "Assessment?" 

Snow Patrol? (One of my favourites of theirs is "Spitting Games") Modest Mouse
- "Float On"?

 I'll second the recommendation for Spoon's "Everything Hits at Once" from
 "Girls Can Tell."  I'm indifferent to a lot of their output but that's a
 fine track.  I'd say Mickey was biased in favor of the hometown band but
 I know several other people who think very highly of them.  For me some of
 their stuff clicks, some doesn't.

 As far as Neutral Milk Hotel goes, several people have already recommended
 them to Ken and he's tried "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" and had something
 of an allergic reaction to Jeff Mangum and his chaotic goodness.  That's
 prevented me from recommending other (lesser, but still worthy) labelmates
 on the Elephant 6 label, such as the Apples in Stereo (sample tracks:
 "Stream Running Over" from "The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone" and
 "Strawberryfire" from "Her Wallpaper Reverie")  I won't push them on Ken
 but people who like sunny Beatles-wannabe pop will probably enjoy them.

 Speaking of Beatles-influenced, "Humpty Dumpty", the excellent opening
 track on Aimee Mann's 2002 album "Lost in Space", is practically wallowing
 in Beatles nostalgia.  The rest of the album is a disappointment, however,
 coming after her much superior 2000 LP "Bachelor No. 2, or the Last Remains
 of the Dodo."  "Bachelor No. 2" is chock full of good songs but my favorites
 keep shifting so I'm reluctant to single any out for special attention.
 I suppose if I had to recommend one as a place to start I'd pick "Red Vines".

My pick for Beatles nostalgia remains Sam Phillips' 
"Martinis and Bikinis."   Everybody knows that one, right?
Curiously, I have never cared much for another album by Ms. 
Phillips.
 
Thanks, I'm reading all of these and I hope to get to free sampling
of most/all of them.  Some are going to slide until Jan 2007, but 
the idea of buying a mix CD off of iTunes will be, I hope, an 
ongoing project.

 I didn't realize we were opening the floodgates to include stuff recorded
 last millenium..

 But maybe I'll give "Martinis and Bikinis" a listen sometime -- I'd avoided
 it because I'd heard other stuff by Sam Phillips that I didn't like much at
 all..

(Well, the vague guidline for my compilation CD project is rock from, 
say, the 21st Century.  But since the topic of Beatles-influenced tunes
came up...)

 I'm not sure if it's Ken's cup of tea, but I'm currently lovin'
 the single "Cobrastyle", wherein Swedish pop group the Teddybears
 meet up with Jamaican dancehall DJ Mad Cobra.  I'm guessing that
 at some point the novelty of this insanely catchy tune will wear
 off but until then I have just one thing to say:  my style is
 the bomb di di bomb di dang di dang diddy diddy, oooo ooo
 ooooooOOOOOOOooooooo!

(( I ran out of time to get the mix CD sequenced and built before 
   the holiday travelling, but I do expect to come back to this 
   after Christmas. 
 
   I've just hit that point where all tasks and projects are in 
   a sort of triage mode right now, and if something is not 
   necessary to the family holidays, and takes more than five 
   minutes, it's getting deferred for now.  Aieeee, trip panic! ))

Two fun CDs picked up at the used shoppe yesterday.  A British jazz
group called the Nostalgia 77 Octet, "Sevens and Eights."  
Supposedly heavily influenced by free jazz, though so far I have
only run into one track featurign the sort of squally unpleasant
dissonance I usually associate with free jazz.  I bought this 
out of the player in the store after hanging around and tapping
my toes through three tracks.   This is a fairly current release.
I need to dig around the web and read some more about these guys.
 
The other was a safe buy -- La Bottine Souriante, "Let's Dance With LBS."
This is an anthology of instrumental tracks, mostly drawn from the 
band's brass-band era which started around 1994.   I have all the 
source albums and so I had passed on this when it came out, but 
for $10 it makes a nice trinket for the car.   Oh, this was a USA 
release, and La Bottine Souriante is the most prominent Quebecois
folk band.

Quickie reviews/mentions from the four-concert weekend:

Saturday afternoon:  U. Michigan Early Music Ensemble, which is a mix
of students in Edward Parmentier's early music class, along with a few
townies, mostly in the chorus.  This concert is the class final
project, I think, as it comes along at the end of each semester.

Alas, much of this one left me cool.  I'm not sure that two soprano
saxophones are the right instrumentation for Telemann and Praetorius,
though high marks for originality!  But I did love the suite at the
end, "The Apotheosis of Corelli," by Couperin, arranged for
harpsichord, flute, violin and cello.

Saturday evening:   Holiday concert by Ann Arbor's Vocal Arts
Ensemble, the choir my wife sang with for a few years.  Two baroque
settings of the "Magnificat", by Pergolesi and Vivaldi, mixed in with 
a bunch of European carols and a few Hannukah tunes.  
Always fun to hear this group sing, as they
are very good, and to chat with them all afterwards.

Sunday morning:  OK, technically a church service is not a concert,
but this one had a small orchestra, dancers, and my wife had a big
vocal solo.  Nice settings of some religious Christmas songs from
different European backgrounds, some familiar and some new to me.

Sunday evening:  the annual Ragtime Bash at the Unitarian-Universalist
church.  This December tradition has been going for over three
decades, though this was only my fourth or fifth time.  The music
branches out somewhat from ragtime to include some stride, boogie
woogie and a bit of jazz.  About a half dozen performers from around
Ann Arbor, Detroit and Toledo, including John Remmers.
There were two ensembles with novel instrumentation for ragtime this
year; one string quartet, a subset of the River Raisin Ragtime Revue,
and one trio of piano, trumpet and banjo, a subset from a saloon band
down in Toledo.   I scribbled down the name of that band but I 
don't have it with me.

Tonight: yet another concert.  World Premiere for "The Old Burying 
Ground," a song cycle based on inscriptions from a New Hampshire 
cemetery, and featuring folksinger Tim Eriksen who has been a fave of 
mine back to his days in electric-folk band Cordelia's Dad.  
Second half of the program is Stravinsky's RITE OF SPRING.  
This is a free concert presented by the University Symphony Orchestra.

Fun way of finding new bands:  read newspaper writeups on the SxSW 
festival, and then start trawling through MySpace for the bands 
some critics liked.  Find #1:  Los Campesinos, from Wales.  80's
style "punk/new wave", male/female vocals, big melodic sound 
from a seven-piece group.  Maybe old geezers like me need to stick
with the retro stuff.

Darn. I like 'em!

 I'm hijacking Ken's musical meanderings because there's no miscellaneous
 item in this cf and I'm too lazy to create one.  But I found this newspaper
 article somewhat amusing:

 Old rockers give new meaning to life and lyrics
 -- 

 The unlikely image of a 92-year-old war bride screaming The Clash's
 "Should I Stay or Should I Go" into a microphone backed by an
 elderly chorus has already captivated live audiences around the world.

 Now the film version is set to do the same.

 "Young at Heart" documents the group of U.S. senior citizens belting
 out songs by Sonic Youth through to James Brown. The small-town
 act has been running for some 25 years but international fame is
 now at hand.

 "A monster has been created," filmmaker Stephen Walker joked in
 an interview about the film's rise.

 It started as a 2006 British television documentary and became an
 audience favourite at the Los Angeles and Sundance film festivals
 in 2007 and 2008.

 The opening sequence showing Eileen Hall, then 92, singing the
 1982 hit from punk-rock group The Clash provided the inspiration
 for Walker when he first saw the group onstage in London in 2005.

 "I was totally blown away," Walker said. "It was an amazing way
 to look at this song afresh. It becomes a song about love and death
 and not about relationships."

 That led to Walker spending several months filming the group in
 Northampton, Massachusetts -- population 30,000 -- as members
 struggled to master lyrics from Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia" to
 Allen Toussaint's "Yes We Can Can."

 The film opens across the United States this week and, after scoring
 distribution deals, will soon open in France, Belgium, Switzerland,
 Germany, Japan and Australia.

 (read the rest at:  http://tinyurl.com/4kmssq )

The movie Mike described, "Young at Heart," opens imminently at the 
Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor.

That one has garnered some very positive reviews.  

Years ago, one of the first cool things from the BBC was a London
Jazz Festival concert by Ketil Bjornstad of song settings from
John Donne, with Anneli Drecker of Bel Canto singing.
 
The radio concert was clean and uncluttered; the CD issue of the 
same material, titled GRACE, was over-instrumented and juggled 
too many different singers.
 
Ketil Bjornstad has a new album of Donne arrangments out, called
LIGHT.  On the short bit I have heard from the BBC, it sounds like
he kept the CD simple this time.

Eeek, did I not get my review of the Great Lakes Folk Festival posted?
Will try to paste it in tomorrow.

The giant Borders CD & DVD clearance sale ends on Sunday May 3, says
the most recent Borders mailout.  I picked up 3 classical CDs while
the sale was at 30%, and then another 5 classical CDs and one opera
DVD while the sale was at 50%.  The only thing I might have wanted 
to pick up were some Tijuana Brass CDs, for nostalgia, and the DVD
of John Adams' opera "Doctor Atomic."  Supposedly, according to 
Borders.com, there is still a copy floating around the Arborland
store, but I was unable to find it.  The copies in Downtown Ann Arbor
and Brighton are supposed to be gone.
 
The DVD is of the original staging by Peter Sellars, from a production
in the Netherlands.  I don't know if there will be a DVD of the 
Metropolitan Opera's production by Penny Woolcock, which was part of 
the HD Live series in Oct. 2008.  "Doctor Atomic" is believed to be 
the only opera created in an awful long time to receive two 
separate productions from major companies.

From the Detroit newspapers, music romance gossip:

Meg White is to marry Jackson Smith.   Meg White, as most readers
probably know, is the drummer for the White Stripes.  Jackson Smith,
as I only vaguely dimly knew, is the son of Patti Smith and the 
late Fred (Sonic) Smith.   The last time I was aware of him was
when Patti Smith emerged from semi-retirement to do a memorial
show at The Ark shortly after her husband's death, and I had some
dim awareness of Patti Smith's kid wearing a Green Day T-shirt, or
something like that.
 
Jackson Smith is the guitar player in a Detroit band, "Back in Spades."
I see some online reviews say it's pretty good guitar rock.

http://www.freep.com/article/20090502/ENT04/90502028/Rockers+Meg+White++Jac
kso
n+Smith+set+to+marry

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