With the recent Sunny Day Real Estate news, I figured it’s about time I posted my second part to my “Emo Style” Round of Sound I posted way back when. All the same holds true that I said back in that post concerning these songs. There is still A LOT I have left off this playlist, and this isn’t meant as a definitive guide to what is “emo”, it’s just songs that at one time or another have been considered emo…like it or not.
A few notes about these tracks: Some of these are just extensions of songs I posted on Part 1 meaning that a few of these bands have a counterpart from that list in that they may be side projects or a whole new band all together spawned from previous projects (ie. Further Seems Forever -> Dashboard Confessional, The Get Up Kids -> The New Amsterdams, Mineral -> The Gloria Record). Also, some of these bands are still going strong (Cursive, Dashboard, New Amsterdams) and some of these bands are no longer but have spawned notable new acts (ie. American Football -> Owen, Promise Ring -> Maritime). Anyway, I felt like all that was worth mentioning.
Garret Kelly and Taylor Shaw (far left and 2nd from left, respectively) have performed their last WSO show.
This time last year Wild Sweet Orange was busy preparing for the release of their long awaited debut full-length, We Have Cause to Be Uneasy, by performing a CD release show in their hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. Well, last night, the four piece performed what they called their “last Wild Sweet Orange show of sorts” at Workplay Theater in front of those very same hometown fans. Over the weekend, on their myspace blog, WSO announced that longtime members Garret Kelly and Taylor Shaw would be departing the band and Tuesday night’s show would be their last, leaving Preston Lovinggood and Chip Kilpatrick to carry on the Wild Sweet Orange banner. So while this doesn’t mean the end of Wild Sweet Orange per se, it is the end of an era and at this point Preston and Chip are being pretty ambiguous as to how the band will progress from here on out. But, I think it’s safe to say that a change in style is a very real possibility and many of their songs through the years may very well have been retired at last night’s concert.
Over at al.com, you can find uploaded videos from last night’s show so you can pretty much catch the whole thing including the final song complete with loads of hipster kids taking the stage to sing along. YAY for teen angst! But boo for the end of an era…
I want to throw out a quick recommendation for an album that’s been tearing up my ipod since it’s recent release, and that’s Up From Below by LA’s Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. Edward Sharpe is the alter ego of frontman Alex Ebert and his Magnetic Zeros are the rest of the 11 or 12 musicians comprising a band that could easily be mistaken as a 60’s hippy group touring around in their converted school bus (they actually do that). I first heard of the group when All Songs Considered discovered them at SXSW back in March, but I kind of forgot about them until a recent (rare) opportunity I had to listen to satellite radio and heard one of their songs which reminded me to check them out. Up From Below, the debut album from the group, was recently released and I got a hold of it off of eMusic and have enjoyed it a great deal. As you can imagine from their KCRW performance (seriously, go watch this now), their live show is supposedly incredible making their studio recordings a bit of a let down. So the album may not do them justice but since I haven’t seen them live, it sounds just fine to me. It’s certainly a throwback to the psych-folk rock of the 60’s and along with The Phenomenal Handclap Band, I’m enjoying this little retro feel the summer of ’09 has going for it to this point.
I’m often asked how I come across all the new music that I love listening to oh so much. And while I don’t really find it too difficult, you just have to be willing to do some searching, a recent example is maybe the best answer I can give. About a month ago, Paste Magazine released their Best Music of 2009 (So Far) which featured the favorite albums and songs from 7 of the magazine’s staff members. Well, on one of those lists a single commenter made this small observation:
“I’m surprised no one has chosen ‘Paper Cities’ by Other Lives for one of the Best Songs of the Year. It’s absolutely beautiful”
I was intrigued. So after doing some research and checking eMusic for it’s availability…bada bing, bada boom, new music discovered. The internet is an amazing tool. An obscure comment by some guy on an albums of the year post led me to discover a release that I somehow missed out on. It’s as simple as that.
Other Lives is a 5-piece band from Stillwater, Oklahoma but was formerly known as Kunek and released an instrumental album under that name back in 2004. As Other Lives, they released their self-titled debut album a few months ago on TBD Records to little fanfare. There seems to be some Radiohead comparisons which I find pretty lazy. So the lead singer every now and then sounds a bit Thom Yorke-ish, thats about it. Piano and strings play a large role in the music and fit nicely with the melancholy tone of most of the tunes and lyrics. I would tend to compare the group more to Elvis Perkins (Ash Wednesday version more so than Dearland) off the top of my head and they have toured with Perkins earlier this year (as well as The Decemberists) so that comparison seems apt. You can stop by their myspace page to pick up the two songs below as free downloads. “Black Tables” was (apparently) featured on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy last season and “Paper Cities” lives up to the above commenter’s suggestion of it being one of the most beautiful songs of the year.
Well, here we are at the All-Star break so what better time to summarize the Orioles 2009 season than at the halfway point. So yeah…this could will be a long post. First things first, I have to preface this post by mentioning that I couldn’t care less about the Orioles record this year. No one (including the front office) expected the Orioles to contend or even come close to contending this year. When COO and GM Andy Macphail took over in 2007 he said he didn’t expect to put a contender on the field until 2010 at the earliest. The key to this season for the O’s is progress…on the major league club and in the minors. So if you go by that judgment scale, the first half of ’09 has to be seen as a success. So let’s break it down:
To conclude my mid-year wrap up of the music so far in ‘09, I figured I’d do A Round of Sound featuring some of my favorite tracks of the year that I haven’t already mentioned in a post on the blog. So here’s a few of my favorite songs so far in 2009 that will all surely be candidates for my end of year mix tape.
A little something I like to do every year is dole out some awards for the music up to the halfway point of the year. Nothing too detailed, just a little summary. As usual for all my lists, the only albums I’m including are albums that I own and are currently in my itunes library. And of course all this can change as I listen to albums more, but this is what I’m feeling so far for 2009. Enjoy!
Animal Collective
Best, let’s say, 7 Albums (in order of release date):
Antony & the Johnsons – The Crying Light
It’s a beautiful and affecting listen, which was to be expected from Antony Hegarty. It was the first great release of the year and has stuck around to now. I already mentioned in my 1st quarter of ’09 wrap-up…nothing more to add to that really.
Once again, check my 1Q of ’09 post that mentions this release as well. People are starting to pick up on its brilliance but it will surely gain even more of a following once Frenchkiss reissiues it this August.
The only album of these 7 that I haven’t mentioned on the blog yet. The first 6 songs are hard to top. Longstreth tones down the weird just a bit, and it gets album of the year hype…go figure.
One of my most listened to albums so far this year. It doesn’t deserve any album of the year or even top 10 talk, but I think it deserves more attention than it’s getting.
They left behind their melodic pop hooks that made Peregrine so good, and went back to their post-rock instrumental days with bland results. Best description I’ve heard was that it’s like Explosions in the Sky tried to make an Appleseed Cast album…not what I was hoping for.
I just haven’t put enough time into this one to get a reading on it. Some of it has some early Built to Spill indie feel to it, which deserves my attention.
For some reason, I never got around to checking out the David Bazan DVD released last year until just recently when Dave mentioned on Twitter (@davidbazan) that the summer clearance sale on Undertow Music was extended. So I figured it’d be a perfect time to snatch the DVD up. If you’re not familiar with Bazan, then well, you probably actually are you just don’t realize it. Up until 3 years ago Dave was known as Pedro the Lion and released 4 full-length albums under that moniker before retiring it and creating a new era as just David Bazan. He was named one of the 100 greatest living songwriters by Paste Magazine back in 2006, and personally he’s my favorite songwriter/lyricist. I’ve been lucky enough to see him a couple times in concert, once as a headliner and once opening for Death Cab and Ben Kweller. Dave loves to take questions from the audience during the show, and it is pretty refreshing to hear an artist ask the crowd “Are there any questions at this point?” in between his songs.
The DVD consists of Bazan playing an assortment of songs from all his albums, including his lone Headphones release, and even one of his new tracks from his upcoming album Curse Your Branches slated for release on September 1st. I wouldn’t say there is anything extraordinarily special about the DVD, but it’s pretty cool seeing Dave play his songs at home alone in front of the camera with just his guitar or piano. It’s such a simple idea, but very well done. One of the coolest moments is him playing bits and pieces of “Slow and Steady Wins the Race” while in his car stopped at an intersection, or in the gas station or even in his driveway as his wife pulls up with one of their kids. But maybe the neatest part of the DVD is the interviews with Dave that take place in between a few of the songs. Dave writes some of the most dark, tragic, and brutally honest lyrics about human nature and has an amazing knack of creating stories that get his points across. However, he does not write autobiographically so while it seems like deeply personal music, it’s really just his thoughts on religion, relationships, politics, family, or whatever told through his brilliantly crafted stories. But at the same time, this is a married man with a family, so writing songs of doomed marriages and dysfunctional families is a pretty amazing subject matter for him to cover and has always been an interesting paradox.
David Bazan
So listening to his interviews is a very engaging look into the thought process of the man and his very intriguing world view. He mentions that the upcoming album is actually fairly autobiographical for the first time in his music career, so it will be very interesting to see how and if his lyrics change when Curse Your Branches drops later this year. The best interview on the DVD is the last which tackles the fact that Bazan rarely writes a happy song and he’s actually been challenged in the past to write a love song. He responds by naming a few of his songs that he believes are, in his mind, songs of true love. Hearing his defense of what he thinks of as love song captures his brilliance as a song writer perfectly and is absolutely refreshing to hear. The last song performed on the DVD is “Please, Baby, Please” which is a song that will be featured on the new album, and is one of the songs Dave mentions as a love song. Whatever you say Dave. How this man’s mind works is something to be appreciated, and I’m sure happy he allows us a small glimpse into his world.
I’m not the kind of guy who stops watching his team when the game is out of hand, no matter what sport. I still like to watch to see how some of the youngsters perform and maybe take some positives out of an otherwise lousy game. And every so often, I am rewarded with something I can say I was able to see while everyone else flipped the game off (such as Nolan Reimold’s first career homerun off Mariano Rivera earlier this season…the only player to EVER do that). But nothing could have prepared me for last night’s improbable, exhilarating, and downright stunning comeback win for the O’s over the Red Sox.
Down 10-1. 7th inning. Against the best bullpen in baseball. No problem. The O’s scored 10 straight runs capped by Nick Markakis’s two run double and won it 11-10 (and didn’t even need the 9th inning to do it).
Pie and Markakis celebrating the comeback victory.
Everybody stepped up, from the usual guys like Markakis and Roberts (nice time to break out of an 0-18 slump) to the youngsters Wieters and Reimold. But how about Oscar Salazar pinch hitting for Mora when the game was seemingly out of hand, and hitting a 3-run bomb to spark the rally? And how about Mark Hendrickson pitching a very nice 3 innings of relief after the rain delay and only giving up a run to keep the Orioles within striking distance (as unlikely as it seemed)? But for me, the best performance came from Felix Pie who was only in the game because Adam Jones slammed his head against the wall trying to rob a Youkilis homer in the first inning. All Pie did was contribute with an RBI triple in the third and a clutch RBI single in the 5 run 7th. However, the play of the game that no one will see was Pie gunning down a Sox runner at the plate to close out the 8th inning. The O’s had just scored 5 runs to close within 10-6. If the Sox are able to tack on a run right after that rally, the wind would be taken out of the O’s sails and all momentum would have been lost. He made a perfect throw to Wieters to save a run and gave the Orioles even more momentum to build on going into what would be an amazing 8th inning complete with a Sox bullpen meltdown including Papelbon’s first ever blow save against the O’s.
Phew! The Orioles exercised a lot of demons with last night’s win, and it serves as a bit of redemption from the Mother’s Day Massacre against the Sox back in 2007 that (eventually) cost Sam Perlozzo his job. It’s wins like these that can get the entire organization excited. Imagine the calvary down in the minors hearing about this and how pumped they must be. It’ll be interesting to see how the team responds to this comeback (the greatest in O’s history) and if they can build upon it not only this season, but even looking further down the road. But I’m not even going to worry about that now. I’m just going to bask in the glory of returning the Red Sox and their bandwagon nation to their glory days of being world class choke artist. But that almost gives the Sox too much credit for this. The Orioles players won this game because they played the full 27 outs, plain and simple. Go O’s.
With the recent Sunny Day Real Estate news, I figured it’s about time I posted my second part to my “Emo Style” Round of Sound I posted way back when. All the same holds true that I said back in that post concerning these songs. There is still A LOT I have left off this playlist, and this isn’t meant as a definitive guide to what is “emo”, it’s just songs that at one time or another have been considered emo…like it or not.
Posted by Hawkins 
A Round of Sound 