Plug of the Week: Muse

I am hooked on Muse. I know they are big in Europe, which makes them radioactive in the US, but I like them. It's hard to describe them. Think of how Queen had its roots in ballads, music hall, rock, and classical and then pushed toward glam, and prog rock. Muse did sort of the same thing but starting from punk, new romantics, classical, and prog rock. And then discovered there is no top they won't go over. (I am not making any comparison of musical or performance quality.) Sort of like the Wipers and the Cure get in a spaceship together and head out for Planet Glam. In any one song, they can switch from noodly space synths to banging rock on a dime, throwing in a bit of flamenco or surf guitar or ballad just for fun. Sometimes the lead drifts over onto the bass while the lead singer/guitar are wandering completely off in outer space. They lay beautiful liquid flowing backing harmonies over and through it all. Plus, "Supermassive Black Hole" is one of the best dance songs ever recorded (IMO, of course). It sounds as weird in practice as the description, but it works.

I think that their live performances are tighter than their studio recordings (leaner arrangements). They have a good chunk of one of the concerts available for free (hard to beat that) if you'd like to sample. CLICK HERE FOR FREE STUFF. You can get one song and video clip on the front page; register to get a handful more of each. If you buy the CD of that performance, they throw in the concert DVD for free. Plus, the bass player says that they don't make much money off the records anyway, look at them as promotions for the concerts, and don't care a lick if people download them. (I mean, not that anyone would do that anyway.)

Muse
on Amazon.com

The only thing better than an overwrought ballad is EMBEDDING an overwrought ballad

IMEEM is turning out to be a lot of fun. It has video and audio players for material from artists and users, which is all cool. It doesn't play nice with Last.fm scrobbling, alas. Here is one I listen to often that I should be embarassed to admit I really really like: I think this gives only a 30-second clip here, but you can hear the complete track if you click through. I think -- I'm still figuring out the details.

A Little Post is Better than Nada

Check out the twin-accordion action! Doug Sahm & Freddy Fender are on my short list of best vocal combinations in a rock-like group. Two of my other pairs are Micky Dolenz & Mike Nesmith and Layne Staley & Jerry Cantrell.

Why I am hiding in my sandbox like Brian Wilson

It doesn't seem like the modern world has a place for ordinary grief left to take its own course. We are supposed to manage it somehow, I think. There are routines, ritual ways of talking about it, limits on leave and the expectation that after a few weeks or months it will just be over. And it's just not like that. My friend died 3 months ago. I am past thinking of him everyday, but I still haven't been able to delete his number from my phone. I am handling the day to day stuff pretty well, but I can't get a handle on anything much more. Whole weeks of routine laundry and grocery and going to work slip by without leaving any sense that time has passed. It's getting better, bit by bit, but there are bad moments like spotting his birthday in the calendar ahead that still break me down. (I was so proud to put that in there. All these years and I was never able to keep his birthday straight, and lost the note every time I wrote it down.) I'm listening to a lot of music and thinking about it. I have things I want to write about, some written notes even. I just can't get my thoughts on anything abstract to line up coherently. Time for small steps. One useful thing I've learned: all those things they tell you about how to feel better really do work. Sleep more, drink more water, get outside and walk around, all that stuff that seems like such a drag--it works, not overnight but gradually. The big three for happiness: sleep, water, and sunscreen.

I get around!

Take the top 20 artists in your Last.fm profile. For each of these artists, collect the top 5 similar artists. The resulting number of unique artists is your eclectic score. If the score is small (extreme = 5) your musical preferences are very limited, and if it is large (larger than 80, extreme = 100), then you have an eclectic musical preference. You can compute your own score at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/eclectic.php

My eclectic score is currently

94 / 100

The 94 related artists for my profile are (hed) Planet Earth, 3 Doors Down, 7 sharp 9, Acres, Anat Cohen & The Anzic Orchestra, Arctic Monkeys, Beach Mercer, Beck, Bench Grinder, Big Star, Black Light Burns, Boys Like Girls, Breaking Benjamin, Buster Bailey, Calling All Monsters, Cardinal Trait, Chris Cornell, Coal Chamber, Coldplay, Cracker, Creed, Cute Is What We Aim For, Dakona, David Binney, Desole, Dishwalla, Donny McCaslin, Earshot, Emmylou Harris, Five Finger Death Punch, Flaw, Foreign Oren (2), Franz Ferdinand, Fuel, Gin Blossoms, Guy Clark, Hawthorne Heights, Honestly, Hot Action Cop, Ill Niño, Jack White, Joe Ely, Josh Kelley, Josh Ritter, Ken Dawson (2), Kid Rock, Live, Local H, Lostprophets, Lyle Lovett, Marc Broussard, Matchbox Twenty, Matt Nathanson, Matt Wertz, Mushroomhead (2), Nine Days, No Second Troy (2), Northmont, On the Speakers, Pearl Jam, Placebo, Radiohead, Reporter, Rob Thomas, Ron Blake, Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, Scott Stapp, Sevendust, Shinedown, Shock Stars (2), Silverstein, Slipknot, Sloan, Son Volt, Soundgarden, Stabbing Westward, Static-X, Steve Earle, Stone Temple Pilots, Submersed, Taproot (2), Temple of the Dog, The Raconteurs, The Strokes, The Used, Three Days Grace, Tonic, Trapt, Tyler Hilton, Uncle Tupelo, Velvet Crush, Whiskeytown, Wilco, Yeah Yeah Yeahs

---

Take the top 50 artists in your Last.fm profile. For each of these artists, collect the top 20 similar artists (where the artist itself is the #1 most similar). The resulting number of unique artists is your super-eclectic score. You can compute your own score at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/supereclectic.php

My super-eclectic score is currently

717 / 1000

The most similar artists for my profile are Filter (5), Saliva (5), Orgy (4), Fuel (4), Spineshank (4), Stone Temple Pilots (4), Sevendust (4), Blue Öyster Cult (4), Drowning Pool (3), Mushroomhead (3)

Any way you slice it, it’s only rock and roll

I just saw Shine A Light. I'm glad I did—it's a engrossing look at a band on stage, more so because the Rolling Stones have been playing together for so long.

There are plenty of things that I could write about the Stones, their body of work, their history, the songs that they chose for the concert, the musicians they have on stage with them. But all those things have been written elsewhere, and probably a lot better than I could. I have never been a particular fan and I don't know much of their history or songs that were not big hits. There are a couple of things that I took away from the film, however.

Mick Jagger is a pro. He gives a great performance. But he does it like someone doing a job of work. Music is what he does. Keith Richards, on the other hand, seems to live in the music. It's what he is.

The other thing the film makes me think about is Petey's chicken. Petey was a neighbor of my grandparents, an old bachelor who had always lived alone. Whenever he cooked a chicken, he cut it up any old way. We would hold up an odd-shaped piece and ask him what the name of it was; he would make up funny names until we had run out of chicken.

Watching the concert, I noticed something that I had never picked up from hearing recordings. Ron Wood and Keith Richards cut up the guitar work like Petey cut up chicken: any way they feel like it. Most bands have the lead guitar guy and the rhythm guitar guy. These two don't slice it that way. Sometimes it seemed like they were taking turns from song to song, or from one end of the song to the other. What fascinated me most were the songs on which neither one of them seemed to be playing lead or rhythm. They would each play something cool and the effect of the two parts overlaid was lead and rhythm. I suppose there's a name for that and I bet they teach it in music school, but I don't think there is much of it in your run of the mill rock band.

It makes me want to listen to their work again with new ears.

While my accordion gently weeps

Mike’s death really knocked me down. He has been in bad health for a while, but the news was still stunning. Until this week, I pretty much only came out of my cave to go to work. I spent a lot of time listening to music.

At first, I listened to stuff that Mike liked. He was a concert organist, so he listened to a lot of classical music. He was also a dancing fool, so he loved anything that you would hear in a club. I don’t have much house music or disco, so I listened to a lot of Bach, Beethoven, and Handel.

After a few days of that, I thought I was wallowing, so resolved not to listen to any more Mike music. I tried a little plumb-pitiful "My wife left me. My dog died. Sure am gonna miss that dog" music, but that didn’t help with the wallowing. I switched over to music I knew Mike would hate: country, salsa, metal, reggaeton. But that made me think of all the times we talked about why he didn’t like that crap and I did.

All this time, I was completely paralyzed as a performer. Every time I thought of the accordion, I thought of Mike giving me gas about playing such a lame organ. (Of course, I was able to point out to him the advantages of having an organ that doesn’t use a whole building as a bass resonator.) I cancelled out of all my lessons because I just couldn’t go.

In short, it was a rough time.

Finally, I was listening to salsa and then clicked over to some folky stuff. That started with a rather mumbling vocal and I was straining to figure out the words. I finally realized that the problem was that the words were in English and I was trying to parse it as Spanish. Instead of thinking that I needed to tell Mike about that, I thought of what a laugh he would have gotten out of it and then a good rant about non-English speakers. I knew I had turned a corner when thinking of this didn’t make my brain go blank with pain.

So I hauled myself out to my next scheduled accordion lesson and noticed that the sun still shines. I’m not sure I’d say I’m back, exactly, but I’m not gone anymore, either.

NOW LISTENING

Crashlight from Thanks for Nothing.