TheMaker

I can't fathom why this would be irksome to anybody. Off the top of my head, I couldn't even name any fade-outs vs. full-stops, to be honest. Songs simply end they way they're meant to.

Call me crazy, but every time Obama repudiates the repulsive "guns 'n' god" American lifestyle, I love him an inch or two more. My pet theory is that he's a closet atheist; if you examine his general speech re: religion, you'll notice that it's very guarded. Whenever he discusses his personal relationship to the church, he's careful never to state that he believes in Jesus in a literal sense, simply that he believes in his, and the church's, message. He was raised in an areligious household, and it's very, very difficult to fall into such a genial, mostly inoffensive cult as Christianity if

I was surprised by the content of the latest Yep Roc email to land in my inbox... Looks like they've abandoned their longstanding practice of releasing the album in Canada first on murderecords and then waiting the better part of a year for the U.S. release. Interesting... Figured I'd share, since there seems to be a fair few Sloan fans on this board. I thought NHTEOI was a genuine return to form, so I'm pretty pumped about this announcement.

On this forum, I'm legitimately surprised that the Doors have any votes at all. I don't think I've desired to hear a Jim Morrison song since I was 15.

Here's all the proof I need to convince me that global warming is real and has reached a plateau worthy of panic: it was 106 fucking degrees where I live last fall on Canadian Thanksgiving. I'll be shocked like I cannot even express if we don't have a number of 100+ degree days again this year in May. Each year, the smog/heat/humidity becomes more and more unbearable, and I do not use that word lightly. Sothern Ontario is basically Africa now in the summer. This isn't normal. Period. Irony or no, this is a perfect encapsulation of conservatism: money first, real and important things s

Uh, she wasn't a homeless lady, dude. Well, maybe she was, but that ain't what she was doing on the street corner! Biggest laugh of the episode, hands down. I loved Dwight's nonchalance as they drove past her. "Yeah, in my world, it's perfectly acceptable to bring a hooker to a dinner party as my date." Pretty solid episode, although they launched into the cartoonish hijinx way too early, which sort of did away with any kind of momentum leading up to Jan smashing the TV and the cops showing up. The last "act" was absolutely hilarious, though.

Yeah, it's nowhere NEAR as good as Monster or Up.

James has more than one song? And people care? Not to be an asshole, but wow. Maybe I should check this out. And I'm not being sarcastic, for the record; it's just that it honestly never occurred to me that there might be more to this band than "Laid." It'd be like finding out that there's more to EMF than "Unbelievable."

$1.11 a litre. Sheesh, I'm glad to be a non-driver!

This poll sez: nine people are very, very good liars. Yeah, actually, most people can't differentiate between a 128 kp/s MP3 and a 256. I remain convinced that this is just a fucking bullshit strawman argument dredged up by audiophiles with nothing better to do with their time.

Agreed. FotC is very nearly the funniest thing I've ever seen on cable (bested only by CYE in the half-hour comedy domain), but "the D" is just stupid humour. Can't see the appeal, frankly, whereas the comic timing in FotC is just spot fucking on, eleven times out of ten. Rhys Darby absolutely kills me. That guy's the funniest TV star since Simon Pegg, hands down. Oh, and the album's leaked, by the way!

Yeah, it's a "special" Pulitzer, like the one they gave Art Spiegelman. Bastards. Seriously, though, it's a great honour, and one that's long overdue.

I sure as hell don't have kids, but I've got a number of really intriguing children's records in my collection nonetheless. Woody Guthrie is known mostly as a polemecist today (although that's probably not the case in Wilcoworld, since many different sides of his writing were exhibited on the Mermaid records), but he wrote a number of fine sides for young audiences, stuff like "Car Car" and "Don't You Push Me," which can be found on his Songs to Grow On record. One of my favourite albums of the '90s is The Story of Harmelodia, by the underrated Canadian band Rheostatics. It's a wildly imaginat

So, I'm basically the only dude who thinks I'm Amazed is by far the weakest of the new tracks? It's a lot of fun, but it suffers for being pretty much exactly what you'd expect the guys to crank out following Z. Not that there's anything wrong with another big rocker from MMJ, mind you. I can't stop listening to Evil Urges. It's one of the - wait for it - most amazing rock songs of all time, in my opinion. The refrain (not that you can get away with calling it that) just takes off like a shot and the guitar breakdown three and a half minutes in is like a fuckin' rock and roll puma in flight.

Accelerate is growing on me. It isn't great, and it's still laugh-out-loud funny that Rolling Stone called it the best album the band has ever made, but there are some really solid songs on here (Man-Sized Wreath, Horse to Water, Sing for the Submarine). I still maintain that Hi-Fi is a total piece of shit, arguably the nadir for R.E.M (excepting Around the Sun, which brings new meaning to the word terrible). It's just a shapeless, colourless mass of generic rockers, almost all of which sit and spin their wheels for five to six minutes when it feels so obvious that they should be over in lik

"I was boooooooorn by the river... in a little tent..." Contrary to popular belief, there is but one version of this song. It is by Sam Cooke. Nobody else would dare to attempt it.

That is just flabbergasting to me. The aesthetic was such that the band was so much MORE than the sum of its parts. It'd be like somebody going, "Yeah, this band The Beatles is pretty awesome... but I hate that Lennon guy. Can't even listen to his stinkin' voice!"

Yeah, it's just so fall-down hilarious, I know, to suggest that a great album is precisely that because of the involvement of all of the songwriters and musicians who created it, not just the ones we fetishize on this website. Hang that shit up on the wall just as soon as you finish framing it, Orson; you'll want company to see it, for sure. Do you actually think Wilco's MA songs are treatments that Woody would have endorsed? I'm not saying he would've disliked them, but he sure would have been baffled by some of them. It's a shorter step to I Ain't Got No Home from Stetson Kennedy than it i

I was sort of with you until that last comment. You can't have it both ways, can you? I agree that race relations often boil down to unfortunate buzzwords, but I don't agree that "Obama isn't black enough," which is the line you're effectively parroting here. And besides, you have to be a rich fuck in order to become the president of the United States of America. Let's face it: the deck is stacked. When you've got fixed elections on a four-year cycle that are loaded with rock-star politicians, a candidate must be willing and able to spend mega-bucks in order to maintain a constant media prof

Let's just put it this way: we all know whose songs Woody would prefer.

I am, if anything, far more progressive than the next guy. I am also somewhat unorthodox in my political views (example: I've been ridiculing Earth Hour for the past week, but that's simply because I refuse to own a car and the only electrical devices on in my apartment right now are this computer and a small space heater; wow, practical living geared to actual solutions to pressing issues instead of just lip service). It's because of this that I am able to laugh my ass off at the ridiculous man the author mentions here. For the sake of nothing less than his very sanity, I hope he's atoning fo

I really can't fathom why anybody would even think to do this sort of thing. Bragg's contributions are more honest than Wilco's, and there are just as many brilliant interpretations by Billy as there are by Jeff & co. Stetson Kennedy, Way Over Yonder, Walt Whitman's Niece, My Flying Saucer... these are stellar, stellar songs.

Wow, Hype Repellent is as clever as he is hardcore, guys! Damn. What I love - and I mean love - about VH1 is that non-U.S. residents are barred from viewing the site's actual content, but their sponsors' videos tick right along. Awesome! The 21st Century is so great! Anyway, I can't comment on the performances, but what did you guys think of the soundtrack for that ad for AmEx? I thought the piano was absolutely ethereal, personally.

Agreed, totally, although I have yet to even listen to the whole disc. The motivation just isn't there. Q: What do you get when you mix equal parts White and Benson, but sand off all the rough edges and flashes of innovation that make them great on their own? A: Boring music.

To be fair, they didn't try all that hard. By White's own admission, the impetus for releasing the record unconventionally has less to do with avoiding leaks and more to do with allowing hype to develop around the music naturally, rather than building it up for three to six months before its release. Makes sense to me. Besides, it's inevitable that an act with this big a following is going to have its record leaked as soon as the CDs are pressed and begin making their way through the distribution chain. Every record leaks. Even the ones that don't hit the torrent sites when review copies are