It’s friday, so it’s time for more of my highly warped taste in music.
1. **Tempest, “Turn of the Wheel”**. Tempest is a really cool band. They’re a cross between an electrified folk band and a neo-progressive rock band. Strong Irish and Swedish influences on the folky side, and a vaguely ELP-ish sound on the rock side.
2. **Mel Brooks, “In Old Bavaria” from the Producers**.
3. **The National, “Baby We’ll Be Fine”**. Probably my favorite track from this album by the National.
4. **Hamster Theatre, “The Quasi Day Room Ceremonila Quadrille”**. HT is an offshoot of Thinking Plague. Every bit as strange as TP, but with their own early-music influenced sound. Great stuff.
5. **Kate Bush, “King of the Mountain”**. Kate’s first new album in a very long time, and it’s really fantastic. Very mellow, but with a lot of depth.
6. **Dream Theater, “Take the Time”**. Dream Theater is an amazing neo-progressive/metal band. This is off of an album of theirs that isn’t my favorite, but *anything* by Dream Theater is at least pretty good.
7. **Bela Fleck, “See Rock City”**. An amazing piece of newgrass virtuosity by Bela Fleck. Honestly, I wish he’d dump the Flecktones, and get back to doing more newgrass. The last couple of flecktones albums have been pretty mediocre, and when I’ve seen him live, he seems much more engaged when
he’s doing the newgrass type stuff with folks like Edgar Meyer, Sam Bush, and Mark O’Connor than he does with the Flecktones.
8. **Spock’s Beard, “NWC”**. I’m sure I’ve mentioned Spock’s Beard before. They’re a great neo-progressive band. They started off sounding like a cross between old Genesis, Rush. and Gentle Giant, but they’ve evolved into their own very distinctive sound. Absolutely fantastic. This is a fantastic instrumental track. (And I just got email from them that they’ve got a new album coming out towards the end of November!)
9. **Shirim, “Nokh A Gleyzl Vayn”**. Great bouncy track from the greatest modern jazz-influenced Klezmer band around.
10. **The Clogs, “Lantern”**. The only vocal track on the newest album from one of my favorite post-rock ensembles. Just fantastic. The Clogs never cease to amaze me.
Good Math/Bad Math
The beauty of math; the humor of stupidity.
I completely concur re: Bela Fleck!
I concur on Dream Theater. Have you listend to Score yet?
What about Kate Bush’s Aerial? That wasn’t so long ago.
Pseudonym:
That track is off of Aerial; that’s the album I’m talking about.
Edgar Meyer, Sam Bush, and particularly Mark O’Connor are mega-talents in their own rights (somehow that phrase doesn’t sound grammatically correct, though it probably is), but it’s hard not to be amazed watching Future Man live in concert with the Flecktones.
I feel the same about Bela. The last few times I’ve seen him it’s been pretty lame.
I liked Beck’s performance on Saturday Night Live AFTER I read the lyrics online. Oddly enough, I read them first on John Baez’s Diary. Is “I got my maps all backwards” some sort of theorem about a Dual Space? And what is the Entropy of “The Information”? Is “the ticker tape feeds the mind” actually a Turning tape?
Beck song we heard on Saturday Night Live:
… listening to Beck’s latest album, The Information.
From the song of that title:
Ahhh
The information is ravenous
The ticker tape feeds the mind
Looking for a lost transmission
A heaven that we left behind
When the information comes
We’ll know what we’re made from
Strange era we live in, that such dark lyrics could be so popular. The “single”, Nausea (which we heard), is even darker:
I’m a seasick sailor
On a ship of noise
I got my maps all backwards
And my instincts poisoned
In a truth blown gutter
Full of wasted years
Like blown-out speakers
Ringin’ in my ears
Oh it’s nausea, oh nausea
And we’re gone
It’s nausea, oh nausea
And we’re gone
I can’t find the famously damned with faint praise first review of Bob Dylan in The New York Times, that helpfully suggests that he might have a future as a harmonica player.
Not sure where to put this, but some laughs at:
Math Pick Up Lines
Hamster theatre !
Love it.
Is it nocturnal in nature – as the hamster does his/her job running on the wheel round and round ?