Posts Tagged ‘music’
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I seem to have misplaced my notebook which is where I generally draw. I lost it after I had already pencilled this one which was kind of a hassle. This one is drawn in my Leonardo Da Vinci sketchbook and is significantly larger than any previous. I hope to find my notebook tomorrow because this is just untenable. On the plus side, this one has actual original artwork that I may be able to send to somebody for Christmas or something, so every cloud has a silver lining.
not a word i heard could i relate
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Using only song titles from ONE ARTIST, cleverly think of answers to these questions. Then tag 15 friends. Try not to repeat song names. It’s harder than you think! It’s best to pick a band with a large catalog.
Pick Your Artist: Pink Floyd
Are you male or female?: Vegetable Man
Describe yourself: Waiting For The Worms
How do you feel about yourself: Sysyphus
Describe your current boy/girl situation: Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict
Describe where you currently live: Empty Spaces
If you could go anywhere you wanted to go: The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party
Your favorite form of transportation: Bike
Your best friend(s) is(are): The Gnome
Your favorite color is: Green Is The Colour
Favorite time of day: Time
If your life were a TV show, what would it be called: Careful With That Axe, Eugene
What is life to you: Burning Bridges
What is the best advice you have to give: Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert
Thought for the Day: Give Birth To A Smile
How I would like to die: The Thin Ice
My soul’s present condition: Obscured By Clouds
It’s been a while since a proper Music Monday (which has been replaced for the foreseeable future by Bad Comics day in any case) so I will take the opportunity to feature another of my long standing favourite bands today.
Treble Charger began in the mid-nineties as an alternative band under the name of NC-17, named for the American film rating. In their earlier days they were a very melodic band and later turned to a pop/punk aesthetic. On their first, independently released album (entitled nc17), there was a song called Red which was re-recorded and included on their full length major label debut, Maybe It’s Me, released in 1995 (there was also an EP called self=title).
The original version above, and the new, below. The new version is more familiar to most Canadians though both have their good points. Red was one of the first songs my sister learned to play on the guitar and she used it for years to check if guitars were in tune.
There were quite a few songs released from Maybe It’s Me. Ever She Flows, Friend of Mine and How She Died are all sterling examples of where music was in Southern Ontario in 1997. Following this up proved to be a daunting task, one to which I’m not sure the band was exactly equal. They went, as I mentioned above, into a pop/punk mode for their next album, Wide Awake Bored. This was probably a more financially successful album and was bigger in the U.S. but I don’t like it as well as Maybe It’s Me. American Psycho is apparently about Courtney Love.
One gripe I do have with Treble Charger is that they worked with Sum 41 in their early days and I think the world would probably have been somewhat better off without Deryk Whibley and Co. ripping off a bunch of other, better bands. Detox was Treble Charger’s last album and the video for Hundred Million features, amongst others, Avril Lavigne and so I had pretty much given up on them and stopped listening by this point. It’s a very catchy tune that annoys me immensely.
I am a man of many hobbies. Almost too many because they tend to get in the way of each other and when I’m involved in one I am often thinking of the other. There are days that I can’t wait to get home and draw some stuff but when I actually get to the point of drawing I think “oh but I should play some guitar” and then in the tuning-up process I will wish to be writing and usually this spirals down into playing videogames and a bit of self-loathing.
Occasionally, though, I will actually generate a complete something. Most of this stuff has been shared earlier but a couple parts are new or changed and so are, I feel, deserving to be disinterred.
The most recent item of note is the following coloured comic strip. David Malki ! of Wondermark fame runs a colouring contest every now and again and the winners of said contest get their work published in his collections. I entered the below item and did not win but I learned a pile about the GIMP and had fun working on it.
looking forward to seeing who won
The previously mentioned Grocery Girl song has actually had music recorded and is available to listen to. Apparently it has over 1000 plays since Andy posted it.
Finally, here is the slideshow of the forum cartoon battle that I made in the spring. It’s pretty incoherent!
A couple of days ago, Andy T. twittered to say something about falling in love with some woman who works at the Foodland Grocery store in Vineland. I sent him a link to Barenaked Ladies performing McDonald’s Girl and thought no more of it. On Wednesday, he messaged me to ask for my lyrical input to a song he was writing based on his experience. Over the next two hours, we generated the following with the help of a rhyming dictionary. I present to you, “Unrequited Love for a Minimum-wage Grocery Store Employee.”
VERSE ONE
Driving into the parking lot
at a quarter to four
Here for items that I forgot
and maybe, I hope, for morePassing through produce and rounding the deli
I dash down the canned veggie aisle
I don’t pause in seafood as it’s far too smelly
Then I catch the glint of her smileCHORUS
She works for long hours down here in the store
She bags up all their groceries
We could be friends or oh, so much more
I want her to be close to meVERSE TWO
Her shifts are like clockwork; she’s always on time
Five nights out of every week
From three ‘til eleven to bring home a dime
Her love is the favour I seekI find myself here always more and more often
I wander and shop with no list
My dream’s for her cool mien to soften
and by her perhaps I’ll be kissedCHORUS
BRIDGE
For her eyes are as bright as the overhead lights
Her hair is a fine shade of yellow
Her smile fills my heart like the fruit in my cart
Some grapes and perhaps a tangeloVERSE THREE
She’s too short to manage the top row of shelves
She stretches and strains just to reach
We never say “hi,” all wrapped up in ourselves
My heart’s all bruised up like a peachThe sliding doors part as they sense that I’m nearing
I walk slowly back to my car
I look back through windows that she’s busy cleaning
So very close and yet so farCHORUS AND FADE
Copyright 2009, etc. etc. look for the new album out maybe sometime.
a machine that only takes quarters
Edit: Sorry for the multi-post. I’m getting very spotty internet connection here and so it looks as though it tried to choke to death.
I am not a really regular concert goer. There are very few bands that make me want to drop a whole pile of money on a couple hours of entertainment (though I have seen Radiohead twice and those tickets do not come cheaply). My first real concert was when I was in 10th grade.
Fed Hall at the University of Waterloo used to have a lot of small bands come through (they may still, I am very out of touch with events in my former hometown these days). At some point in 1995 or ‘96, two fairly popular bands (now, sadly, relegated to the status of one/two-hit wonders) did an all-ages show at 4:00 and then a licensed show later in the evening.
First up was Zuckerbaby. I have, someplace, a tape of an interview and acoustic set with them, recorded in a fairly scratchy and staticky fashion from my trusty old radio/tapedeck/cdplayer bookshelf system (the speakers of which still see action as the right- and left-rear surrounds in the basement). They were clearly there to rock the faces of these teen concertgoers. The Age of Electric was not really into playing for a non-drinking audience. They were pretty lacklustre and had almost no stage presence.
I have a few fairly isolated recollections from that afternoon. A girl from my Orchestra class watching Zuckerbaby’s guitarist light a cigarette on stage and exclaiming “We can smoke in here?!” The guitarist stuck his light cig in between some strings on the headstock of his guitar.
There were perhaps 50 people down on the floor in front of the stage and they were doing their very best to mosh. Two guys managed to crowdsurf a little until the AoE’s singer got sick of their antics and told the bouncers to kick out the next person who tried it. Disbelieving the willingness of the staff to do so, one memorable crazy man in a red t-shirt motioned his friends to pick him up. The hulking bouncer-types made very good time through the minor crush, despite their heft. They picked him up bodily (which, thinking back, was what he actually wanted; people holding him up in the air) and carried him down the long, glassed in hallway to the main doors. I could hear him yelling and swearing all the way down the hall over the sound of the band.
For some reason, Fed Hall had all their payphones about 2 feet from the stage, off to one side. I was calling home for a ride and getting an absolutely awesome migraine all at the same time. It was a real time saver.
i know that i’ll be living it in canada
As I am something of a music lover (or possibly addict, depending on who one asks), I often have music running through my mind. Since it is one in the morning and my brain is misfiring, I will share with you a couple things that have been stuck up there for some time.
I also have the guitar riff from a very 90’s type song that I’ve had running around at odd times. I have no idea what the song is called but I’m pretty sure the lyrics have ‘and I want it/and I need it’ somewhere in them and it’s got a really crunchy and catchy guitar part that goes most of the way through it. I’m sure I’ve heard it in the last six months but I cannot for the life of me figure it out.
I would like to highlight the fundamental differences between two very large and popular British bands. On the one hand, Radiohead and on the other Oasis.
This video is from a show I was at in Toronto in 2003. I am not exactly clearly visible in the video as it was shot from someplace up on one of the balconies in the Skydome (now Rogers Centre) and I was waaaaaaaaay down on the floor just in front of stage left where Johnny is standing.
Skip ahead to about the 2:25 mark if this is not your kind of music. Thom Yorke (lead singer) stops the song because he has just seen somebody down on the floor pass out and go down. He saw the guy from stage and there were 200+ people down there. He then jumps right back into the song and is actually way more animated after that. It was all people were talking about on the subway ride back up to Yorkdale. The man has some phenomenal rockstar powers to see somebody go down like that with stage lights shining in his face.
By contrast, here is a video of Oasis in concert, also from Toronto.
The action starts at about the 55 second mark. Here it is again from a different angle, roughly the same time line:
There are some pretty fundamental differences here, I feel. I just can’t quite put my finger on them.
Today’s featured artist is by no means whatsoever any kind of new group. I got a stack of records from my brother-in-law shortly after Christmas (my parents gave me a turntable) and one was New Order’s Substance double LP. Most people have heard a couple of New Order songs and I would like to present a few to you today.
New Order formed out of the ashes of Joy Division in the early 80’s after Ian Curtis (the lead singer of Joy Division) committed suicide.
Blue Monday is one of their most popular songs. You may have heard the Orgy cover (this was my first exposure to the song). I prefer the original. Apparently the bassist came in at the wrong time during the recording but it was one of those happy accidents that adds more to the song than would have been there had it been done ‘right.’
As previously noted, I really like remixes and this is one of my favourites of all time which just happens to be a New Order cover. You may have heard it before. It’s the music playing during the rave in the slaughterhouse near the beginning of the first Blade movie.
The video is not exactly exciting.
The final video for today is another of their very well-known songs, Bizarre Love Triangle.
Something I have realized of myself is that I love a good remix. I am willing to accept a mediocre remix but I really enjoy a solidly done reimagining of an original work. There are a lot of songs where I am significantly more familiar with a remix than with the original and generally prefer the remix. Taking that to an extreme is a ‘band’ like The Kleptones.
The Kleptones are actually one guy (Eric) who takes a whole lot of different music and creates new work out of them. These are called mash-ups or bastard pop. He has released several different albums. One of the big ones is A Night at the Hip-Hopera which, as the title implies, is a reimaging of Queen’s classic Night at the Opera with a lot of rap songs. All of their stuff is available for download at their site as linked above. Note: some of the language in the source songs is, shall we say, questionable, so please be fore-warned.
Here are a couple of cuts from various albums:
This video is also a mash up of a whole lot of different dances from movies/tv shows. Some of the more noticeable songs that you’ll hear in this are
- Aerosmith – Dude Looks Like a Lady
- White Stripes – Hardest Button To Button
- NIN – Hand That Feeds
This video has a song from the album 24 Hours which is a brilliant concept album outlining a full day in someone’s life. It has quite a bit of Daft Punk in it.
