picked up a few new cds on monday…
- dale watson – whiskey or G-d (palo duro)
- enon – high society (touch and go)
- dntel – (this is) the dream of evan and chan (plug research)
- trans am – liberation (thrill jockey)
- grandaddy – just like the fambly cat (v2)
dale watson is of course a Texas honky tonker, and as far as modern folk go, one of the best imo. this is an album of stuff he’d done live and gotten lots of requests for, but never recorded. the european release was called heeah! (a track on the album, as is the u.s. title).
i didn’t really know much about enon…i bought it based on a couple of songs i heard on pandora. but the first track wasn’t anything like what i’d heard. the band evidently has a desire to not be trapped by anything except unpredictibility and deconstruction.
dntel (jimmy tamborello) is half(+) of the force behind the postal service. and i love the postal service. this is an out of print ep. i’ll be looking to pick up more stuff he is involved in.
i liked futureworld by trans am, but red line not so much. liberation is more electronic (like futureworld), which is good, but unfortunately it appears to be an album themed around an indignant response toward bush and america’s response to 9/11 and the “war on terrorism”. i’m not claiming i’m a flag-waving republican by any means, but i don’t really care to hear politically-charged propoganda from either side.
and last but not least, grandaddy is a group of skateboarding commune granola guys from cali (that’s my impression, at least) that play old electronic equipment mixed with guitars and a sort of indie/emo sensibility, and talk about the value of nature and interaction with it and other people. it’s good stuff. i’ve not processed this album enough yet, but my favorite has been sumday. evidently this is their last studio album and they are auctioning stuff off on ebay.
on to other things…
last week on the radio show mc frontalot called in while he was on tour. this past wednesday the folk documenting his tour came to the studio and filmed awhile, then he dropped in himself. he was in houston playing a show. after the radio show, i headed over to the proletariat to catch his set (the first time i’d set foot in the place, as i have a bad impression of it for both perceived image and personal reasons). it was kind of hard to make out his lyrics (or maybe the acoustics were bad where i was standing), but the band was tight and the live show was nice. it was interesting to see the crowd that showed up. and the many computer and geek culture tees they were sporting. i think top honours go to the guy sporting the cult of the dead cow tshirt, whom i learned a bit later was actually skout.
perhaps i should explain this whole thing a bit…you see, mc frontalot is one of the forerunners of the nerdcore genre — a combination of geek/nerd culture and rap music. in fact, he’s credited with coining the term “nerdcore hiphop”. others in the genre include mc chris, mc hawking, and mc plus+ (my personal favorite name choice). so there you have it.