This post is all right, but if you haven’t read my last post read it first, I want people’s input, to let me know if I’m a raving lunatic before I put a bunch of time into this.

This post is also not as good as the 90’s. The 90’s was a great decade. It was a pretty prosperous decade, no major wars/disasters (erm. by saying this, i’m probably overlooking something huge, kind of like how history kinda overlooked the Armenian Genocide. So you’ve got the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. That’s probably the biggie. Also the Gulf “war” aka the gulf “we win, but let’s come back in 10 years anyway”. Somalia was a bitch, as was Yugoslavia, and the Middle East and Northern Ireland kept coming back around to bite us. So I guess other than that, no major wars/disasters)

Anyway, other than that it was good. The Golden Age of America? What do you think? We may have peaked back there, when I was 10 or so. Beautiful economy (erm, don’t take all the credit, Bill Clinton), ridiculous technological expansion including the INTERNET, the fall of Communism, I mean, shoot, the Human Genome Project… I could go on. Where am I going with this?

Oh yeah, good music too. Come to think of it, grunge was sort of crap. Well, we liked it in the day, but now it’s morphed into shits like Staind and Nickelback. But it’s the response to grunge that was fun, stuff like Weezer, Beck, Cake, stuff like Radiohead and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And while that was going on, Indie Rock was born.

So basically, I’m writing this all to say I kinda like Pavement. Slanted and Enchanted is a nice CD, more than I was expecting when I heard it was officially considered a starter of the “lo-fi” movement. Previously, I’ve heard lo-fi through a few tracks of Guided by Voices, and hated it. But it can be good. Plus I like Stereo, Shady Lane, Cut your hair, and other non-S&E songs I’ve heard. So Pavement, I like.
Built to Spill too, they’re nice. Takes a few (okay a lot) of listens for it not all sound the same, but I do like it. See “Keep it Like a Secret” and “There’s Nothing Wrong with Love”
A.C. Newman: not so good. After track 3, “The Slow Wonder” sputters out. But listen to the New Pornographers' Mass Romantic again, it only has a couple great tracks too.
Spoon: Better. I’d say it’s worth $10 of the $16 I spent on it (buying cds? what?! Well I had a gift card, and they didn’t have Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois.) “I turn my camera on” is, as advertised, a pretty sweet song.
Speaking of which, Sufjan Stevens. The man is awesome. I am itching to listen to Illinois, I hear it’s fantastic. Try “Greetings from Michigan” or “Seven Swans” too, they’re both beautiful.
Bloc Party: Not, actually, so great. I’d count a half dozen tracks I really like, and the rest blend together. The ones that are good, though, are very good: “Like eating glass”, “Positive tension”, “The price of gas”
Bright Eyes, “I’m Wide Awake, it’s Morning: The man himself (I guess I should say, his voice) is really growing on me. This CD, not as much. I’ve never been a really folksy guy, I guess I just don’t appreciate it. But even listening to him tell a story (as in track 1, “the bottom of everything”) is fascinating.
Interpol’s “Antics” is a solid 7/10. Not brilliant, but I like it. w/o “Obstacle 1” and “obstacle 2” it’s hard for it to compete w/ “turn on the bright lights”, but it’s still a good CD.
M83: Starts to grate on me now, after I’ve raved about it before. A lot of tracks are boring. That said, there are still a good 5 or 6 that I could listen to a lot (“unrecorded”, “america”, “0078h” especially)
Wilco: is steadily climbing. After 6 listens-through, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is now a CD that I would voluntarily pick out of my collection to listen to. For a previously not-so-folksy guy as myself, that’s saying something.
Now: out of new music. Damn. Someone get me something to tide me over until I get back to school and i2hub.

Comments:

Anonymous - Jul 4, 2005

OMG Illinois is amazing and I am in love with Sufjan Stevens.

Furthermore, he will be in Cleveland in mid-September. I’m going to try organizing a trip to see him.

Right on.
-Zach

Germit - Jul 5, 2005

Bright Eyes is excellent if you don’t mind some sad music. He’s got it goin' on.