Another Form of Relief

I’m just going to come straight out and say it. I’ve joined the corporate whoring machine that is Myspace. I don’t particularly care for the place, although it’s growing on me a little. Mostly I’m just interested in using it to find some good new music, and there does seem to be plenty of it on there. That said, other cool stuff seems to happen, like Cult Of Sue Todd asking to be my friend! Not the other way around, they asked me! Which is pretty damn awesome. Oh god I’m so easily pleased by shit like this.

Anyways, I know I’m only there for the music, but if you feel like friending me, go right on over to my crudely put together Myspace page.

And if you’re entirely unaware of the cultural phenomenon that is Myspace, here’s a handy primer from the good folks at the Daily Show:

Something that isn’t self promotion..

The two of you that were here from the start will recall that the very first band I ever wrote about on here was The Young Republic. I wandered back onto their site today, and for some reason ended up streaming ‘Modern Plays’, one of the songs I included last time around. I was just a tad surprised when I noticed that an entirely different version of it was playing

MP3 The Young Republic - Modern Plays

While there was nothing wrong with the original version of the song, this new one is just so much better. The sound is much more crisp, the vocal clearer and a ton of new instrumentation added, which makes it line up far better with other Young Republic tracks. If you’re looking for more of them, there are still a ton of mp3s available in their music section. Apparently to throw off those who click “Media” looking for songs.

Next Big Thing alert: Pitchfork have jumped onto the Voxtrot bandwagon, giving their two EPs a 7.8 and an 8.2. Which will probably make them the indie darlings of the month to those who hadn’t already found them.

Now I’m going to go to bed as I haven’t slept more than about five hours in the best part of a week and can hardly stand up. Actually, before I do, I just like to come back to Myspace for a second. How long will it be before everyone in the world is on the damn thing? Apparently 7000 new users signed up in the time it took me to write this post. Which is just downright scary.

Following the disaster that was the middle of the week, our little themed posts get right back on track with a, if I may say so myself, rather good selection for friday. It seems the weekend is the time of the week that really brings out the more interesting material from the songwriter, as will be proved by the awesomeness to follow on saturday and sunday.

MP3 Morrissey - Friday Mourning (expired) (from Let Me Kiss You single, 2005)
It’s Morrissey. He’s not very happy so he’s leaving. And that’s about it.

MP3 Bright Eyes - A Few Minutes On A Friday (expired) (from A Collection Of Songs: Recorded 1995-1997, 2000)
One of the things I particularly like about Bright Eyes is the way every song tells a whole little story. Now I know nearly all songs do this to a point, but the level of detail that goes into a Bright Eyes song is something more. That Mr. Oberst is so good at doing that now is one thing, but the fact he was doing it ten years ago (he would have been around 15 when this was recorded) is just downright scary. And makes me think I’ve wasted my life. But no matter. In this tale, young Conor is obviously in love with a friend but can’t say anything to her because either she won’t feel the same, or there are always other people in the way, or whatever reason he’s stopping himself this week. Didn’t think this could get any more miserable after Morrissey? That told you.

MP3 The Cure - Friday I’m In Love (expired) (from Wish, 1992)
Fine, you want a bloody happy song? Here you go then. I shouldn’t really need to explain anything about this song to anyway, as honestly, who doesn’t know it? It’s simple, it’s happy, and most of all, it’s damn catchy.

MP3 Silver Jews - Friday Night Fever (expired) (from Bright Flight, 2001)
I’m not a big enough Silver Jews fan to know whether this song is a flat out and out country song, or whether there is some hidden wry joke involved in it all that I’m too dense to miss. I suppose it doesn’t really matter either way as the song is a great little country ditty (how often can I get that word in without seeming weird?) that kind of subverts the usual country stereotypes. It seems ol’ Dave is slightly bored in his marriage so hits the bar on a friday night, but while stressing “She knows I love her and I need her / And I’m no cheater / I’ve just got that friday night fever” and that he’ll be straight back home to her at closing time. It’s actually all rather nice in a twisted kind of way.

Which brings us to a close for friday. Be sure to join me tomorrow for no less than seven songs that don’t really go together but all happen to have saturday somewhere in the title. Excited? I know I am.

This post actually begun life as a conversation in the pub last saturday. And by a conversation, I mean something that lasted all of two lines. Here’s a recreation of that action packed drama:

Simon: I’d like to hear that Ben Folds tribute song to Elliott Smith.
Eddie: I have that. I’ll throw it up on the blog at some point.

Now this was said in something of a jokey way. Surely putting up songs for friends from conversations in a pub is hardly the most professional way to go about running an mp3 blog. The more I thought about it though, I came up with slightly less feeble ways to spin it into an entire post. What began as a single song I was going to throw up with some other stuff has turned into a small collection of Elliott Smith tribute songs. Now I’m not bothered about crappy covers of Smith songs, just the original songs that were inspired by him. Which makes him sound like a film soundtrack, but no matter. I don’t have many of these though, but we’ve got three. For what it’s worth, I was going to put up Weezer’s ‘The Other Way’ with this as it apparently relates to a point, but it seemed a tad inappropriate.

MP3 Ben Folds - Late (expired)
Well this is the song that started it all off. Apparently Folds knew Smith, and toured with him a few times. Which would have been one hell of a concert to see live, but I digress. Folds’ tribute to Smith is the kind of song that he can do best: the simple piano ballad that focuses primarily on the lyrics for impact. It’s an incredibly sad song (”No, no / Things were looking up for you / Least that’s what I heard / No, no / Someone came along and washed away your hard-earned / Piece of mind”), although I suppose that’s an inevitability given the subject matter. One of the few songs from ‘Songs From Silverman’ I really do like though.

MP3 Rilo Kiley - Ripchord (expired)
MP3 Rilo Kiley - It Just Is (expired)
I could have put up nearly all of Rilo Kiley’s 2004 album ‘More Adventurous’, as there’s a ton of Smith related content on there. Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett were obviously huge fans of Smith (Sennett so much he seems to model himself on him musically), and that’s reflected in a lot of the album, but particularly these two songs. ‘Ripchord’ is just Blake and an acoustic guitar, which fits the song perfectly. I’ll be perfectly honest that I didn’t even realise it was about Smith at first, but it seems so obvious now. The second verse is sung directly to Smith (”I don’t know if you meant it / But you did yourself in / And I was even having a good day / When I found out we’d lost you”) and ends up being incredibly powerful. ‘It Just Is’ is the song that closes the album, moving from the loss of Smith the artist (”He wasn’t our son / He belonged to everyone”), moving through to the broader acceptance of death itself. It’s a powerful and fitting eulogy.

And just to bulk this out a little more, it only seems fair to include a little Smith while I’m at it..

MP3 Elliott Smith - A Fond Farewell (expired)

There are a bunch of other tribute songs to Smith according to a list on his Wikipedia entry, but these were the only ones that I already had. Or rather, the other ones listed were by bands that don’t really appeal to me all that much. There’s also a ton more Elliott Smith related content over at Sweet Adeline, his official website. You know, just for those of you who have been living under a rock these past few years and aren’t actually aware of him.

Well I did warn you that thursday would be the awkward one, although it’s turned out even worse than I could have anticipated. I managed to come up with one whole song that relates to the day. This is really the bottom of the curve though, and there’s a bunch of awesome songs for the upcoming three days.

The Features - Thursday (expired)
I’m not a big fan of The Features. I have their album, but it doesn’t really grab me at all. It’s too kind of heavy and samey to me, a la We Are Scientists. Fun songs by themselves but an entire album at once is just grating. ‘Thursday’ though sounds nothing like anything on there, being considerably more laid back and intricate, the varying styles of music really adding to the whole thing. The song itself is a simple tale of building up the courage to speak to a girl and then the inevitable rejection that follows. Not that they let it get to them or anything, which also makes the song better than your average depressionfest on such matters.

So I guess that’s all I have to say about thursday I’m afraid. Not a great deal to it. I promise you it improves greatly from here though, and I’ve got four most excellent songs for tomorrow.

Betty By Alone.. again

You may or may not have read my post last week about the great Brazillian band called Betty By Alone. At the time I complained that I couldn’t find out much about them because their site is in Portugese. That’s no longer a problem though! The drummer from the band, Rafael Goraieb left a nice message pointing out their English language website. It’s not the most perfectly written thing in the world, but it’s certainly more helpful than nothing at all.

And so the bottom of the barrel scraping begins. Apologies for this one, but it’s kind of necessary to get a set of the complete week. It struck me earlier on that I should have just combined tuesday, wednesday and thursday into the one post, but it’s a little late for that one really. This one will be brief as I’m pretty much exhausted (four hours sleep + going out + working = inability to stand up) and have to be up early to head into the office for once.

MP3 Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories - Waiting For Wednesday (expired) (from Tails, 1995)
This is the point where I admit that I actually quite like Lisa Loeb, and have done for a long time. Since whenever ‘Stay’ was first released actually. I remember liking it at the time, but then never really gave it any more thought until I heard it again a few years ago. The ‘Tails’ album that it’s taken from is actually really rather good, even if some of her later albums became a little too bland for my taste. ‘Waiting For Wednesday’ is something of a twisted breakup song, in that it switches from the narrator not wanting her boyfriend to break up with her to her being the one doing the breaking by the end of the song. Which is a terrible description, but when did I ever say I was good at writing this kind of thing?

MP3 Saves The Day - Wednesday The Third (expired) (from In Reverie, 2003)
When you have a singer that sounds like a 13 year old boy waiting for his voice to break in the first place, having him sing a song in an even higher pitch than usual probably isn’t the best of ideas. That said, the rest of the song is still pretty good, and one of the more solid from Saves The Day’s most mature album so far, ‘In Reverie’. I have no idea what it’s about (the US elections makes sense given the date, but that doesn’t really connect with the lyrics), but it does somehow end up sounding pretty good in the end. Yet I’m completely at a loss to describe why.

MP3 Emiliana Torrini - Wednesday’s Child (expired) (from Love In The Time Of Science, 2000)
If I labelled this as Bjork, would anyone really be able to tell the difference? There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I usually can’t stand Bjork’s music, but thankfully I can handle this. Another song where I can’t really tell you what it means, just that the ambient electronica and vocal combination works well enough for me not to care that much. Which is quite a feat given that I hate pretty much the entirity of the album that it comes from. Her follow-up, ‘Fisherman’s Woman’ is a far superior album, moving much more into mellow acoustic territory and greatly turning down the electronic.

In my defence, I did warn you about this post, and I’ll remind you again that the thursday post probably won’t be great either (current song count: one), but I swear to a deity of your choosing that the rest will be awesome. And I’ll try and come up with other good stuff in between too. Now though I’m off to bed given I can hardly keep my eyes open and need to be up by 8.

So it appears as if I may have written myself into something as a corner by doing a whole week of these. Following an in-depth investigation carried out today, wednesday and thursday are looking pretty shit. On the upside though, I guarantee you that the weekend set of posts will be full of awesomeness.

And so we reach tuesday, probably the day of the week with the least things to distinguish it from any other. Depressingly, the only unique tuesday thing I can think of is that it’s the day of a pub quiz that I sometimes take part in. Other than that, nothing. It’s just a nice holding day for the more eventful ones later on in the week. Or not for the likes of slackers like me, but that’s not really the point.

MP3 The Pogues - Tuesday Morning (expired) (from Waiting for Herb, 1993)
One of the few Pogues songs I actually like (I only really care for ‘Fairytale of New York’ if I’m honest), it’s a nice catchy song. It’s not the kind of song that needs any deep analysis, or more accurately I haven’t bothered trying to work out if it’s meant to happy or miserable. It seems to somehow swing both ways for me. It’s a great catchy song though, and that’s the most important part.

MP3 The Minders - Hooray For Tuesday (expired) (from Hooray for Tuesday, 1998)
Hey, you’ll never guess exactly where I got the title for this run of posts from. Well, you might have an idea now anyway. The Minders seem to be sadly overlooked to a certain part, their 60s psychedlic sound seemingly getting lost between the great material put out from others like Of Montreal, Beulah and The Apples In Stereo. ‘Hooray for Tuesday’ is their best album, this title song representing it perfectly. Much like the Wilco track from yesterday, it has a timeless feel, sounding exactly like something a bunch of bands would have been putting out in the 60s, yet so few are today.

MP3 Neutral Milk Hotel - Love Me On A Tuesday (expired) (from Yoyo A Go Go ‘94 compilation, 1994)
MP3 Neutral Milk Hotel - Tuesday Moon (expired) (Unreleased.. I think. Correct me if I’m wrong)
Finally, kudos to Neutral Milk Hotel for seemingly being the only band to really get behind tuesday, by making not one, but two songs, involving the day. Granted the songs are basically the same, using the same lyrics but reworking the music entirely. Which means they would have fitted perfectly on my post of bands covering themselves, but I didn’t have both of these back then. ‘Love Me On A Tuesday’ is a great little (literally given it’s 1:55 long) rock song, soaked in distortion. The fact the lyrics are pretty much indecipherable on the most part doesn’t really matter given how good it sounds. Get past the weird introduction of two kids talking on ‘Tuesday Moon’ and you’ll find another little gem, where you’ll actually be able to hear the words! Which means we can actually hear just how nice these songs happen to be.

..and finally

An amusing clip of a man who calls into QVC with a rather honest report of how he uses his new Dell PC.

I guess that’s it for tonight. I’ll be back tomorrow with an even weaker selection of songs (and if you think they are bad, wait until you see thursday!) for your enjoyment. Apparently I’m going outside to see V For Vendetta tomorrow. Which I’m actually kind of looking forward too. How very exciting.

Arab Strap is a band that I’ve always had an irrational hatred for. This is nothing to do with their music, which if I’m perfectly honest about, I don’t think I’ve ever heard. Much like Belle & Sebastian though, something made me decide that I didn’t like them and that feeling has lingered. I’m trying to rectify this now though, and will be listening to some Arab Strap as soon as one of their albums arrives. The reason for this change of heart is the guy pictured above, Malcolm Middleton.

Malcolm Middleton is one half of Arab Strap. From what I can tell, he’s the one who doesn’t sing, but obviously this doesn’t mean a great deal to me. I downloaded his single, ‘A Happy Medium’, without actually knowing of his connection of Arab Strap, which is a good thing as that would have probably put me off. Thankfully though, I got to hear it in all of it’s shambolic glory. Music that’s all over the place, back and forth male-female vocals, and such cheerful lyrics (”woke up again today / realised I hate myself / my face is a disease”).

This encouraged me to seek out the rest of the album it came from, last year’s ‘Into The Woods’, which has quickly become a favourite. The depressing tone remains throughout, and even the happy songs have Middleton worrying that if he isn’t depressed, he won’t be able to write songs and that his career will be over. I’m sure this is all slightly tongue in cheek, but he sings with enough conviction that it doesn’t really matter.

MP3 Malcolm Middleton - Break My Heart (expired)
MP3 Malcolm Middleton - Loneliness Shines (expired)
MP3 Malcolm Middleton - Monday Night Nothing (expired)

These three songs are my favourites from ‘Into The Woods’, with ‘Break My Heart’ capturing the tone of the album perfectly. Middleton likes to write depressing songs, but seeing as he doesn’t have a great deal to be miserable about, he’s left with quite a dilemma. “You’re gonna break my heart I know it / but if you don’t / you’re going to ruin my run of unhappiness and destroy my career” he sings in a way that should come across half mockingly, but instead makes you feel quite sorry for the guy. ‘Loneliness Shines’ finds him singing about how he feels that even though he’s ‘got it all’ he ‘appreciates nothing’. I spoke about ‘Monday Night Nothing’ in my last entry, so I’ll spare you it again here. Suffice to say, it’s all cheerful stuff.

We’re all about the lame gimmick post heres at Another Form of Relief. Or, if I’m entirely honest, we’re all about the lazy posts that write themselves. This kind of random post breaks up the constant pimping of new artists a little though, so they work well enough for me.

As you can see, we have a bunch of songs that aren’t connected in any way other than them all having monday in the title. I’m half kicking around the idea of doing one of these for each day of this week, but it could prove a little tricky as there aren’t a lot of songs that relate to the midweek days. Note to new artists: Take that song you’re writing about saturday nights and convert it to thursdays! Someone needs to balance these things out a little.

MP3 Pulp - Monday Morning (expired) (from Different Class, 1995)
Ok, hands up, who can name a single Pulp song that isn’t called Common People or Disco 2000? Nope, didn’t think so. It’s kind of a shame really. I’ve never been a big fan of Pulp, and I myself was guilty for a long time of completely ignoring anything they did other than those two songs. That was until last year when I picked up ‘Different Class’ on the cheap and discovered it was actually a very good, consistant album. ‘Monday Morning’ is one of my favourites from the album, a tale of an aimless life spent solely living for the short term excitement of the weekend.

MP3 Wilco - Monday (expired) (from Being There, 1996)
One of the most flat out rock ‘n’ roll songs to come from Wilco, so it’s fitting that it’s all about rock ‘n’ roll and the lifestyle of a band. There’s a certain timeless feel to this song, in that you could tell me that it came from the 60s, 70s or whatever and I probably wouldn’t really question it. In another act of indie blasphemy, I really don’t like the kind of music that Wilco puts out these days, but I really like this. I couldn’t really tell you why though, other than a nice and vague “it rocks” type answer.

MP3 Tegan And Sara - Monday Monday Monday (expired) (from If It Was You, 2002)
Ah, the joy of a fucked up relationship song. This song has absolutely no relation to monday other than the fact the chorus is simply the word “monday” sung twelve times over. No matter though, it’s a great song, going through the shitty part toward the end of a relationship (”Your house or mine / I don’t really care about it anymore / I close my eyes /I make myself unhappy so you’ll go”) in an alarmingly catchy way.

MP3 Ryan Adams - Monday Night (expired) (from Down To The Promised Land: 5 Years of Bloodshot Records compilation, 2000)
As Ryan Adams songs go, this is one of the more simplistic, but it’s still pretty good. The lyrics aren’t anything to write home about, but I like the blending of both acoustic and electric guitars.

MP3 Malcolm Middleton - Monday Night Nothing (expired) (from Into The Woods, 2005)
Malcolm Middleton (of Arab Strap) is someone I plan to write about in more detail in the future, but for now, we have this wonderful song for his latest album. Middleton writes incredibly depressing songs. Which leaves him with quite a dilemma on this album as apparently he’s quite happy at the moment. As he sings on this song, “Well it’s only a matter of time before I feel like shit again / I’m a happy army marching to defeat”. Cheerful stuff, no? He delivers all of this in a flat Scottish accent, although given the nature of the songs, this detachment works very much in his favour. It’s not too gloomy though, Middleton is another who writes depressing songs with music that sounds far too catchy for it’s lyrics.

I’ve really enjoyed putting this post together actually, so I might see how running this over the course of the week goes. It’s probably going to crash and burn around, oh, I don’t know, tuesday, but we’ll see how it goes. I have a few ideas for songs I can use, so it shouldn’t be a complete disaster.

Like mp3 blogs? Like music videos? It seems Derek from Good Weather For Air Strikes has come up with something in the “how the hell did no one think of this sooner?” line of thinking.. a music video blog. Each video featured is available to download rather than just streaming, and certainly looks like an interesting project. Head on over to Videoteque and check it out.

And yet another hat tip to You Ain’t No Picasso (aka the bestest music blog ever) for putting me onto an awesome little band called Pants Yell!

Granted, their name is slightly strange, yet after listening to their songs it becomes oddly fitting. Not that there is anything in the way of yelling here (no idea about the pants), this is gentle twee rock, the kind that recalls ‘Oh, Inverted World’ era Shins.

There’s a dorky charm to it all. In fact, you might be noticing this is the kind of thing I often come back to in these posts. I’m just a fan of dorky music I’m afraid. ‘My Boyfriend Writes Plays’ is the kind of thing that I could listen to on repeat and not get tired of, although that extends to a lot of their material.

To get to the pimping part of the post, they are releasing a new album on April 7, entitled ‘Recent Drama’, and they have made two songs available from it for our sampling enjoyment:

MP3 Pants Yell! - Kids Are The Same
MP3 Pants Yell! - Your Feelings Don’t Show

..and some older material:

MP3 Pants Yell! - My Boyfriend Writes Plays
MP3 Pants Yell! - Onward, Sailboat
MP3 Pants Yell! - The Not-So City Life

You can pre-order ‘Recent Drama’ for a mere $8 from Asaurus Records, where you can also stream a bunch more tracks from it. For more information about Pants Yell! and ordering information for some of their other releases, head on over to their website.

Other cool stuff:

I Am Fuel, You Are Friends has an incredible live version of Counting Crows’ ‘Rain King’ that seamlessly turns into a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’. There’s a bunch of other Springsteen cover releated goodness there too.

There’s an excellent cover of Feel Good Inc. (Gorillaz if you’ve been living under a rock) by Editors up over at The Rich Girls Are Weeping.

Clever Titles Are So Last Summer is dedicating the week to “guilty pleasures”. I’m quite proud that I only own albums by two of the artists she’s covered so far.

I’m aware going into this that there isn’t a way I can post this without losing at least some credibility with some of the people who read this thing, and I’m comfortable with that.

The man you see to your left is Lars Horris (edit: apparently his real name is actually Andrew Nielsen, proving why I shouldn’t be allowed to write about things I don’t know). He’s a rapper. No, seriously, he is. He raps under the slightly more rap name of MC Lars. My initial reaction was that he must be a joke, but I’m doubting that more and more now.

Lars describes himself a “post-punk laptop rapper”. It’s a reasonable description. All of his songs are created on a laptop, and this seems to be his only backing when he performs live too. As for the post-punk bit, there’s a bunch of punk and rock samplings in his songs, and he even gets other bands to regularly feature in his work. He’s also incredibly post-modern. So much so that he “doesn’t even exist”.

The thing of it is though, to someone who has no idea what represents good rap or hip hop type music, I find his songs to be incredibly catchy. I haven’t quite worked out whether or not this is down to the fact he’s good at what he does, or it’s the nerd appeal that drags me in. By nerd appeal, I mean the slew of clever references to everything dorky, from using netspeak in his songs (LOL, OMG, yo, BRB) to entire songs about science fiction characters (HAL-9000 guests on one track) and a bunch of other things like Myspace, Netflix, emo bands and a new game he’s invented to replace Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, this one featuring Kurt Cobain.

He’s also very, very angry. About everything. The lead off single from his new album, ‘The Graduate’, is entitled ‘Download This Song’, and it’s not in the least bit ironic. The entire thing is a tirade against the RIAA and their ilk. He’s angry about punk posers (’Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock’), and the state of the world in general. Hell, he’s still angry about an old roomate from college.

MP3 MC Lars - Download This Song (expired)

MP3 MC Lars - iGeneration
MP3 MC Lars - Hurricane Fresh

The main thing about all of this is that I don’t know whether or not I’ve been had. Even if MC Lars is attempting to be a serious rapper, does he know he won’t be taken seriously in rap circles so is just throwing in all these references just to appeal to the dorks like me? If I’m honest, I probably would give him a second look if he was rapping about the generic crap most rappers do. I suppose it doesn’t really matter in the long run, as I like the songs, and that’s the part that matters.