Musicwhore.org

I’ve told people the last time I saw … Trail of Dead was in 2002, shortly after the release of Source Code & Tags. I forgot I saw them earlier this year at SXSW. That show was not only truncated but relatively subdued.

I didn’t know whether last night’s show at Emo’s would be a repeat of SXSW. I should not have been such a doubting Thomas.

Let me just note right away there was no destruction of the stage at the end of the show. I must be getting older because I was not disappointed when that didn’t happen. Regardless, the … Trail of Dead guys still tore through their set.

More »

It’s been nearly a month since I posted a "Listen" column. What the heck have I been doing? (That’s a rhetorical question. I got busy at work, and it hasn’t let up.)

Better late than dead, as some endeavors on which I embark end up being, so here’s a selection from another out-of-print CD from the defunct Composers Recordings, Inc. label.

There was a time in Elliott Carter’s life when he did the nationalistic thing and wrote some fairly tonal works. He got over it and went back to writing dischordant pieces. The majority of Music of Elliot Carter, part of CRI’s "American Masters" series, focuses on that nationalistic period.

More »

I don’t really see anything else coming down the pipe, so I may as well call it now.

I usually draft my end-of-year list in November anyway, and if I encounter something in December, it goes toward the following year.

There isn’t much deviation from last quarter’s forecast of the year-end favorites, and honestly, this list only really goes up to nine in terms of 2006 releases. That doesn’t mean I didn’t encounter a lot of great music in the past year.

More »

I intentionally ignored Supercar’s albums before Futurama.

Futurama was such a watershed listening experience, I didn’t want to tempt fate by exploring the work that led up to it. Besides, it would be a mighty expensive endeavor to do so.

It wasn’t until the band broke up in 2005 that I felt safe to start exploring the music that came before Futurama. I could live with the expense of a back catalog so long as there were no future catalog to compound it.

Man, have I been missing out.

More »

I decided within the first week of listening to Mindy Smith’s Long Island Shores I was going to give it a lukewarm review.

But real life kept interfering with my writing time, and I kept putting it off. By the time I was ready to set word to pixel, something strange happened — Long Island Shores took root in my subconscious.

I would wake up some mornings with the songs from the album playing in my head.

What happened between that first week of listening till now?

More »

I’ve been running an old version of Movable Type for a while now, and that’s because I’ve got a bunch of custom code from the old archive depending on it.

I’ve been lazy to upgrade, and the brouhaha over the revised licensing of version 3.0 made me wonder whether it was worth the effort. As a result, this site hasn’t really employed some of the basic requirements of a weblog — comments, specifically.

Well, I upgraded to Movable Type 3.33 back on Tuesday, and today, I’ve enabled the commenting system.

More »

Not that she’s actually gone away or anything, but back in 2004, she put her solo career on the back burner to form Tokyo Jihen.

Two readers have brought to my attention some new announcements on her fan web site — Shiina Ringo is releasing a new single and a new album under her name in 2007.

The Tokyo Incidents web log has a detailed account of the releases, so head over there. Kronekodow also has a special page for the new project, which is tied to a new film titled Sakuran. I will just mention the new single, "Konoyo no Kagiri", hits the streets on Jan. 17, and the new album comes out on Feb. 21, 2007.

There’s also a digital-only single of the film’s theme song being released on Nov. 11. There’s little chance of someone outside of Japan legitimately purchasing this download, since online services such as iTunes require a credit card issued from the country of origin. (Bittorrent *cough* *cough*.)