MUSIC: Silver Bell

Okay, as promised, here's Patty Griffin's unreleased "Silver Bell" album. Despite the label's insistence that this wouldn't sell, it contains a few songs that were made hits by other country artists in the last few years. Enjoy!

01 - Little God
02 - Boston
03 - Perfect White Girls
04 - Truth #2
05 - What You Are
06 - Silver Bell
07 - Driving
08 - Sooner or Later
09 - Top of the World
10 - Sorry and Sad
11 - Making Pies
12 - Mother of God
13 - One More Girl
14 - Standing

MUSIC: Taking a Look at What's Around

What's going around the web these days, you ask?

-Aquarium Drunkard does an excellent post about Gregg Allman, with a bit of a subpost of one of my favourite Jackson Browne songs, These Days. "Do not confront me with my failures, I have not forgotten."

-The Jefitoblog re-posts the unreleased "Silver Bell" album by Patty Griffin, and rips apart some 90's Top 40 hits in their latest Chartburn. A hilarious read.

-Heather at I AM FUEL, YOU ARE FRIENDS posts some interesting alternate versions to everyone's favourite new Ryan Adams album, Easy Tiger, as well as musings on classic Springsteen (avec bootleg, yay!).

-An interesting article on the Hardest PC Games ever. Come to think of it, I never did finish AVP...

-PopMatters has an absolutely spectacular article on the 65 Greatest Protest Songs Ever, that I recommend to any music fan. One thing that I can commend this article for is that it isn't a Rolling Stone article where the word "GREATEST EVER" means "1960-1975 and maybe some stuff from the last five years."

-Some clips from the new Dylan biopic I'm Not There have recently leaked online. Not being a level 18-Dylanite I wasn't entirely psyched about this until now. The clip features a spectacular Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan, and the inimitable David Cross as Alan Ginsberg.

EDIT: Dammit... Jefito took down the Patty Griffin link. I'll re-post this in a few hours.

MUSIC: My intro to this blog

I decided this would be a good introduction to me as a blogger on here so I filled out this little questionaire that I also stole off of travis. I hope to do some Film and/or music reviews this week.

Of all the bands and artists in your collection, of which one do you own the most albums?

My top five would be The Beastie Boys, Nine Incah Nails, Bjork, Tom Waits and The Jam.

What was the last song you listened to?

Litigation Mania by Clock Strikes Music

What are your favorite instruments?

It's a tie between my 8 piece Pacific LX drum set with a royal blue fade and my Ovation mob acoustic guitar.

Who’s your favorite local artist/band?

Clock Stirkes Music (although technically they live in Ottawa now they are from Owen sound originally) or Richard Laviolette

What was the last show you attended?

Tool in Hamilton, mind blowing.

What was the greatest show you’ve ever been to?
Tom Waits in Akron, Ohio. The single greatest moment of my life, when he played Chistmas Card from a hooker in minneapolis I was in tears.

What’s the worst band you’ve ever seen in concert?

Hot Hot Heat, I actually didn't mind them until I saw them in concert. What a terrible live band.

What band do you love musically but hate the members of?

Prince

What is the most musically involved you have ever been?

I'm a band Slut, at one point I was the drummer in 4 active bands.

What show are you looking forward to?

The Roots July 29th and Bjork in september at V-fest.

What is your favorite band shirt?

My "kind of like spitting" shirt.

What musician would you like to hang out with for a day?

Ben Barnett he is the singer/guitarist of Kind of like Spitting.

What musician would you like to be in love with you for a day?

Bjork!

What was your last musical “phase” before you wised up?

Slipknot in grade ten (shut up)

Sabbath or solo Ozzy?

Sabbath for the most part but solo Ozzy is good sometimes too.

What was the greatest decade for music?

I can't narrow it down at all.

What is your favorite movie soundtrack?

If we are talking about a score the score for Taxi Driver or The Fountain. If we are talking about a mix of songs by different artists then it would be The Big Lebowski or Clerks.

Who is your favorite artist who is much better live than on a recording?

Tom Waits or The Roots.

Do you have a hidden desire to be a popular musician?

I'd like to be in a popular band however only if I was making music I enjoyed and I'd probably like to be the drummer so I can still hide out behind the kit and not get noticed as often.

Have you ever used drugs to enhance the music experience?

I haven't done drugs for that reason however some music is just more awesome while on drugs. I remember the first time I did mushrooms I listened to The Suicide Machines and it blew me away.

FILM: Die Hard with a Sidekick

Possible spoilers follow.

Summer is really isn't the place for films that challenge you. It's a place where explosions and action heroes and bright costumes can make their appearance, where transforming robots and boy wizards can strut their stuff without the viewer having to think about possible dystopian futures or international economic and social disparities (I hear that David Lynch just stays indoors all summer.).

That being said, ass kicking doesn't take a summer holiday.

This year seems to be churning out sequels to films that ended their original franchise runs many years ago, as well as some announcements that this trend will continue.

(Speaking of which, it's Harrison Ford's birthday today.)

Die Hard is one such example where you really don't need to know what happened in John McClane's life before the opening credits. Although I haven't watched the original series for a few years now, I seem to recall this being the case with the other three. You can just assume that a long time ago, he kicked some ass.

"Eeet eeez McClane! Keel him!"

The story starts with a very typical "computer hacker terrorist guys are fucking up the world" scenario. Of course, the young computer hacker (the kid from Jeepers Creepers) that McClane is escorting has some inside information on all this new age techno-babble. Whatever.

Explosions, chases and peril are not in short supply throughout the movie. As ridiculous as many of the scenes were, I found my palms to be a bit sweaty during a particular sequence involving an elevator shaft. I can't handle heights, and wouldn't survive three minutes in this movie.

As much as a few people whined and bitched at the film's PG-13 rating, the intensity is no less than the original films (from what I can recall). The only time that it becomes glaringly obvious that they have lowered the rating is when he spouts the inevitable catch phrase, "Yipee Ki-Yay Motherfucker."At the end of the day, the lesson learned is that John McClane can kill, drive or fight anything, and win. You don't stand a chance, and certainly neither do these terrorists.

McClane's badassness is such that I felt like he was going to come through the screen and kick my ass for looking at his smoking hot daughter (who bears a strange resemblance to Jenny Lewis.).

If you're of the appropriate age, go see this movie with your Dad. I'm almost certain he'll love it as much as mine did.

MUSIC: Covers are Fun

Especially when it's Whiskeytown.

Whiskeytown - Dreams (From Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album)

Apologies for lack of posting. This should increase in September, as I'll be writing these entries directly from my home music library.

FILM: Transformers

I've said this a few times now, but this was the biggest damn movie I have ever seen. Like, huge. Bigger than your house and mine put together.

That being said, this review may contain spoilers. Any huge ones I will try and black out, and you can highlight the screen to see them, but I think you get the gist of things. For example: Giant Robots FIGHT!

This is Michael Bay at his finest. It's like if you distilled the plot of Michael Bay's Armageddon, and upped the action about 300%.

However, there have been many negative reviews of this, from people that either thought there wasn't enough of the human story, or from people that thought the human story was contrived and unnecessary. Honestly, it's just a Michael Bay template being put onto a franchise. There's nothing unique here, and even Sam's quest for a car doesn't seem like it's trying to fool me into thinking otherwise. A friend and I were joking that John Voight probably just wandered onto the set.

"Oh shit, it's John Voight!"
"The guy actually thinks he's in charge here! Just start rolling!"

There are plenty of signals so that you can start paying attention for when the action starts. Slow motion shots of pilots getting into jets is a surefire bet that you're going to see some robots fighting something or other soon. And honestly, unless you're one of the uber-fans who spat hellfire at Bay for putting flames on optimus, who gives a rat's (I'll be kicking myself for that when Batman comes out, I'm sure of it.)? This quote pretty much sums up those people:

"There’s a chance that the film could grow on me, but this isn’t elegant, classic storytelling… and ordinarily I wouldn’t hold that against Bay… but goddamn it – this is classic iconography that he’s playing with."

My opinion: BumbleBee isn't fucking Superman. (Then again, Bumblebee never cut off some poor kid's feet.)

The only issue that I really had with this is that the military seem to flip-flop on their stance on the robots. In the third act, John Turturro's character seems to know everything about the robots. I mean, they've been studying Megatron for about a hundred years, right? I mean, if the audience has already bought into that (since suspension of disbelief is very important for something like this), and he's captured BumbleBee, then we believe that the government (or at least Sector 7) has cast a blanket condemnation over these transforming robots from space. Right? WRONG!

The minute shit starts to go wrong (ie: something they seemingly have been planning for for untold years), Turturro loses his shit. Like, it's the end of the world. He's willing to compromise with anyone over anything. At that same time, the government planes (who now has almost zero communications capability) seem to somehow know which of the transformers are evil, and which ones are helping.

I suppose they just shot at the ones with more pointy edges and sharp corners. It's a logical conclusion.

The other thing was that the ending seemed to reek of something from a cartoon. Not that that's a bad thing, it just seemed a little strange to have a conclusion ripped from a kid's cartoon after two hours of robot intensity that the MPAA almost deemed R-Rated worthy. It seems to leave room for the inevitable sequel, which I'm sure will be announced in the coming days/weeks.

For all the tripe that's in this movie, I can't say I expected anything more. Overall my opinion is thus: THEY FIGHT AND IT IS FUCKING AWESOME! GO SEE IT!

MUSIC: Hospital Music

For those interested, Matthew Good's new record is available for some advance listening goodness at his official site. I must say, it's pretty fucking rad so far.

Easy Tiger pickup today as well. This just seems to be my lucky day. I'll report back on that later.

Update: It's here, and it's spectacular. My personal favourite on the first listen is "Halloweenhead," in which the guitar solo is actually announced (something that made me burst out laughing when I heard it). Interestingly enough for Ryan fans, is the inclusion of "Off Broadway" and the reworked "These Girls" (AKA: Hey There Mrs Lovely) from the Suicide Handbook album. So, everyone go buy it. There. That's the review.

I somehow managed to spend a bit more than anticipated on that trip to music world, grabbing Paul Westerberg's soundtrack to "Open Season," and the Best of Sam Cooke (The greatest soul singer that ever lived).

Happy Canada Day to all! Hopefully all of the camping and debauchery in the woods will do everyone some good.