27 posts tagged “radiohead”
This is how I feel this week. Not chosen for lyrical content, just chosen for the music.
It's hard to believe that it's already August, and odd that I'm attending my second Lollapalooza since moving here. Crazy!
Yesterday, after an oddly productive morning at work, I left the office to meet Jess for lunch then headed to meet our friend Josie. She's in town to join in with the shenanigans.
When we dropped her stuff off and endured the slow buses down to the festival grounds, we had missed the first few songs by Gogol Bordello, the band she wanted to see. Their music wasn't really my thing, but their gypsy punk was at least entertaining to watch.
We started to watch Mates Of State, but live they're very difficult to endure - the already ear-damaging vocals do more damage when they're out of key - so we went to wait for Jess by the merchandise stand, hearing little snippets of what I think was Grizzly Bear, judging by the schedule.
With Jess now a part of the gang, we went on down to see Bloc Party. Last year, we bought tickets to see them but didn't think we knew them well enough to justify going. They're really great live, so naturally I regret that decision. They didn't play their best song, 'Little Thoughts', but they busted out 'Helicopter' and 'Like Eating Glass', so I was happy.
After hemming and hawing about whether to stay in place for Radiohead (who were over an hour away), we decided instead to go get food. This had the added bonus of putting us in line with the stage CSS were playing on. I feel bad that I didn't give them my full intention, they sounded tight live, and were obviously far more entertaining than the annoying-sounding Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks they were competing against.
- 15 Step
- Airbag
- There There
- All I Need
- Nude
- Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
- The Gloaming
- The National Anthem
- Faust Arp
- No Surprises
- Jigsaw Falling Into Place
- Reckoner
- Lucky
- The Bends
- Everything In Its Right Place
- Fake Plastic Trees
- Bodysnatchers
- Videotape
- Paranoid Android
- Dollar And Cents
- House of Cards
- Optimistic
- 2+2=5
- Idioteque
Highs:
- 'Weird Fishes/Arpeggi'!
- The awesome radio sampling on 'The National Anthem'
- 'Idioteque' (even though we heard it from outside of the venue as we didn't want to be crushed by the rumoured 75,000 people as they left)
Lows:
- 'The Bends' was played way too slow. There are awesome guitar lines on the verse with the line "The planet is a gunboat on a sea of fear", but the build-up to them didn't work.
- We were too far to see Thom's crazy dancing, boo.
- NOTHING from Pablo Honey? Boo!
I think 'Weird Fishes/Arpeggi' is a strong contender for my favourite song of all time.
This weekend has been... yeah, it's been alright.
Jess made last minute plans to go up and visit her mum in Wisconsin - her mum just had surgery and needed an extra pair of hands, plus they haven't seen each other since Christmas and there's been... stuff in between then and now. I was going to go to some event downtown with co-workers but between the weather and being tired, I lamed out and had an early night.
On Saturday, my friends Jim, James and Nick from back home wanted to play some Mario Kart Wii online. We set up a video chat session on Skype, buggered about forever getting our accounts connected on Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection service then played and chatted for a couple of hours. Although Nintendo's online system is absolutely retarded and as un-user-friendly as it gets, it was good fun.
Other than that, I watched a ton of VH1 countdown shows, played some Grand Theft Auto IV online (which, by the way, was infinitely simpler than the Nintendo solution) then had an early night.
I started my Sunday by watching the Radiohead special, followed by more GTA IV; a trip outside to pick up a package/trade in some games/get supplies; yet more GTA IV; rubbish TV, and so forth. Now I'm having a relatively early night ahead of work tomorrow.
I won't see Jess till after work. Bo.
And now I shall try to sleep in spite of the screaming morons outside.
... I am posting it again.
Just watching Radiohead: Live From The Basement, which I DVRed last night. They are seriously too fucking good.
This is a great year for music. We are only a third of the way through, and already we've had...
January
- In Rainbows by Radiohead was released on CD (naturally, I already had the £40 discbox)
- American Gothic EP by Smashing Pumpkins
- In Field & Town by Hayden
- Field Manual by Chris Walla
- The Bedlam In Goliath by The Mars Volta*
January highlight...
February
- Here's To Being Here by Jason Collett
- Lucky by Nada Surf
February highlight...
March
- Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails
- Volume One by She & Him
- Diamond Hoo Ha by Supergrass*
- Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings by Counting Crows
- Accelerate by REM
- Last Night by Moby*
March highlight...
April
- Keep Telling Myself It's Alright by Ashes Divide (aka Billy Howerdel from A Perfect Circle, I'm listening to it now)
- Mountain Battles by The Breeders*
- Walk It Off by Tapes N' Tapes
- Flight Of The Conchords by Flight Of The Conchords**
- Third by Portishead**
- Mercy by Ours**
April highlight...
* need to buy
** have on pre-order
It's not looking like it's going to slow up, either.
This year's Lollapalooza line-up was announced this week. Jess and I already had tickets on the strength of the rumour of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, meaning we paid $175/£88 instead of $205/£103. Boy, am I glad we decided to go... the line-up is pretty intense. Bolded acts are acts I love, asterisked acts are acts I would be interested in seeing.
Radiohead
Rage Against the Machine
Nine Inch Nails
Kanye West
Wilco
The Raconteurs*
Louis XIV*
Love and Rockets
Gnarls Barkley*
Bloc Party*
The Black Keys* (they played last year and I enjoyed them)
Broken Social Scene
Lupe Fiasco
Flogging Molly
Mark Ronson
Cat Power*
The National
G. Love & Special Sauce
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings
Explosions in the Sky*
Brand New
Gogol Bordello*
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks*
Dierks Bentley
Okkervil River
Amadou & Mariam
Blues Traveler
John Butler Trio
Girl Talk
Your Vegas
CSS
Eli "Paperboy" Reed & the True Loves
Battles*
Steel Train
Jamie Lidell
Bang Camaro
Butch Walker
The Blakes
Mates of State
Tally Hall
Spank Rock
White Lies
Brazilian Girls
Magic Wands
Chromeo
Electric Touch
Duffy
Innerpartysystem
The Kills
The Postelles
Rogue Wave
The Parlor Mob
The Go! Team
Bald Eagle
Mason Jennings
Krista
The Gutter Twins*
Ha Ha Tonka
Yeasayer
Witchcraft
Grizzly Bear
We Go To 11
MGMT*
Sofia Talvik
The Weakerthans*
Booka Shade
Santogold
Black Kids*
Black Lips
Dr. Dog
Nicole Atkins & the Sea
The Ting Tings
Kid Sister
Office
The Cool Kids
What Made Milwaukee Famous*
Does It Offend You, Yeah?*
The Whigs
Manchester Orchestra
Foals*
Uffie
The Octopus Project
Cadence Weapon
Ferras
De Novo Dahl
Noah and the Whale
Margot & the Nuclear So and So's
K'NAAN
Serena Ryder
Newton Faulkner
I only went to V and Glastonbury in the UK, but for the past three years, Lollapalooza has far outclassed both of those... and being hosted by Chicago's gorgeous park land, it's a short bus ride from home, with decent places to eat, drink and stay nearby.
Show us a tattoo.
I have this on my inner left forearm:
It was originally a part of the artwork for Radiohead's OK Computer album, and later appeared on CD singles and the Meeting People Is Easy video/DVD.
Their site is borked right now so I can't order my copy, but the new Nine Inch Nails album - Ghosts I-IV - is now available. It's a collection of instrumental music.
Having tested the waters by releasing rapper Saul Williams' album online (an album he produced), NIN frontman Trent Reznor has adopted the digital/physical combination Radiohead were offering and then some. The different versions of the album are:
- Free: Download the first nine songs from the album as unprotected MP3s with PDF artwork.
- $5: Download all thirty-six songs with the PDF.
- $10: Same as the $5 offering, but you also get the album on 2 CDs.
- $75: Same as the $10 offering but with 1 DVD featuring the songs as multitrack audio to remix and 1 Blu-Ray (which I assume contains the songs set to video footage) in fancy packaging.
- $300: The same as the deluxe edition, but with the album on 180 gram vinyl and two artwork prints. Hand numbered and signed by Trent, limited to 2,500 copies.
Although $300 sounds ridiculous to me, especially when the only slightly less cool Radiohead box was $80, it's great that another successful act is embracing the internet mere years after Metallica and Dr Dre spazzed out over Napster... and in such a way that their fans can choose how much the music is worth to them.
You'd think someone who has been involved in online for longer than most of its main users have been alive would be more embracing of the digital distribution of music. Oddly, for as much of a technophile I am, the idea of acquiring my music from the internet makes me retch.
But of course, I am very contrary. I dismiss the "vinyl is better" set as deluded luddites, but I cannot give up physical media because of my fetishist's love of packaging. Ruffling through a well-designed booklet is as important to me as that first listen of a new album.
Anyway, today we were bumming around outside due to the characteristic good weather and happened upon a trendy t-shirt shop. While looking at their designs, a great remix of a Thom Yorke solo song, 'Atoms For Peace', came on the store's sound system. I made a mental note to look it up when I got home.
I did a search and found out it was a remix by Fourtet, with the first link being to a site called eMusic. It turns out, eMusic is a rival service to iTunes. For $10 a month, you get to download 30 songs in unprotected MP3 format and keep them - even if you cancel your membership (there are more expensive plans and booster packs too). Additionally, during the trial period, you could download a further 50 free songs and keep them if you decided it wasn't for you.
Their catalogue is mostly made up of music from independent labels (Thom Yorke released his solo material on XL Recordings) but they have a lot of artists I like or want to listen to, so I've signed up for the trial.
While I don't think I could ever move over to iTunes - with its barely-cheaper-than-CDs pricing, restrictive DRM and their insistance on pushing the rubbish AAC format - I could easily add eMusic to my normal CD consumption for checking out bands I normally wouldn't hear about.
Link:
As I've mentioned before, when I moved to the US, I had to leave all my CDs behind so I ripped all 11,000+ songs to my portable hard drive and back them up to a second hard drive I bought here. Any new CDs bought since the move have also been ripped to the hard drive - whether Jess bought them or I did - and the number of songs is creeping up.
Today, we both bought a handful of CDs. I got...
- Juno (Official Soundtrack)
- Origin Of Symmetry, Absolution and Black Holes & Revelations by Muse
Jess got...
- Chase This Light by Jimmy Eat World
- The Con and So Jealous by Tegan & Sara
The best part of having such similar tastes is that we can split the cost of buying CDs. So I ripped them and the b-sides to the recent Radiohead single, Jigsaw Falling Into Place, before deciding today was the day to start tackling something I had put off for so long: ripping all the CDs Jess owns that I don't.
There's albums I don't have by bands I like, albums by bands I've never heard of, and albums by bands I personally would never by albums by (I won't mention names in case Jess is embarassed by some of them). I'm guesstimating that there's around 100 CDs to rip in here, at least. By the time I'm done, I'm sure the number of songs wll be over the 14,000 mark.
This is how I'm spending my Sunday.
I spent my Friday at work. I didn't leave the office until 2am as we had to get the two sites we're working on into the staging environment and working ahead of a client demo on Monday. That was fun. I have a few issues to fix tomorrow morning, but nothing scary.
My body wouldn't let me lay in yesterday, so I got up and played some Burnout Paradise. After cleaning the house and watching Waitress (a great film made more poignant by the fact writer/director/co-star Adrienne Shelley was murdered before she got to see the finished product), we went out for dinner and drinks with our friends Jason and Brad.
All in all, it's been a fairly relaxing weekend. Now we're just waiting for Rock Of Love to come on before getting an early night.
