The Entroporium

Now I know what I’ve been missing in life! I need more bands with jugglers! More bands with camel puppets! More bands with moshing nursery school kids! This puts a whole new positive spin on Spinal Tap opening for a puppet show. The Sippy Cups – I Wanna Be Elated(video/quicktime Object) The Sippy Cups – [...]

The Big Picture and Mark Cuban argue that Yahoo’s new music service has effectively set the market price for unlimited downloading at $5 per month. Hey, that’s a great deal! The Big Picture: The Math Gets Even Worse for the RIAA

Joe Pernice writes: It came to me as if in a dream, but I was wide awake, coveting a mesh onion bag full of suet hanging from a bird feeder: There ought to be a show like MTV Cribs for indie musicians/actors. Maybe MTV2 could do it (if they haven’t already) and call it MTV2 [...]

The New York Daily News picked up a story from the new issue of Guitar World, which is published by my company. I am so… um… proud? New York Daily News – Rush & Molloy: Rockers pour out ‘Spinal Tap’ stories

Like the best fiction or movies, Since I Left You defines a self-contained alternate universe with its own rules, logic and celebrities. Individual sounds and samples return again and again without being redundant, instead raising the entire album to the status of “Themes and Variations” rather than the simple drama-building repetition of most DJ projects. It’s a world where the radio plays every station at once, an amalgam of hip-hop, house and soul without ever committing to being any one or the other.

Top 100 Speeches by Rank American Rhetoric provides links to its 100 top American speeches of all time. Save yourself a trip to the library, spice up your interactive book report, get inspired. If you like the ‘nattering nabobs’ line, check #50. Link provided courtesy of LHB

OK, but let’s get down to the nitty gritty here. This is a four-year old band. They were fun. The hit songs rule. But for all the time this band has been together, it was barely able to present an hour of its own material, filling out the show with three lengthy covers. Incredibly cool covers, yes; the redoubtable Mr. Murphy can be counted on for that; and for the record they were “Slowdive” by Siouxsie, “Jump Into The Fire” by Harry Nilsson and some Carl Craig song (does it matter which?) that didn’t work all that well.

Since I spoke of it somewhat dismissively in my last post about Petra Haden & Bill Frisell, it seems only fair to give equal time to Petra Haden Sings “The Who Sell Out”. It is admirably adventurous and well-performed, and some folks whose opinions I value are won over, but to listeners who don’t know the original source material, I’d imagine this is at best a head-scratcher.

Petra Haden has been getting a lot of ink lately for her side work with The Decemberists and her eccentric a capella interpretation of The Who Sell Out, but these may be only the 2nd and 3rd best of her recent releases.