Vacant Horizon

Just saw it. Really liked it. Sure was damn violent! "The Bear Jew" scene was tough to watch.

i didn't think it was that violent. at least compared to his other movies.

i like tarantino, but this was unwatchable. not fun at all like his movies usually are.

The shtick part of your response had me confused. When I hear the term I think gimmick. I wasn't aware that the rock aspect of DBT was a gimmick. Funny enough, I found BTCD to be more of a return to their roots. John Neff was back in the band. It is closer to Pizza Deliverance than any of their other albums. It definitely has more of a "country" feel to it than the previous four did. But, I always thought they were strongly influenced by country artists like Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, George Jones, and Tom T. Hall in the first place.

good points. i agree, DBT do not have a shtick. and i hadnt thought about how they really are returning to a sound reminiscent of pizza deliverance. that's an album i really need to pay some attention to.

Huh?

they're just not writing as 'rockin' songs any more...(?)

Not to turn this into a complete DBT thread, but I was disappointed the last time I saw them live, too. Add the disappointment for me from their last two albums and they have dropped a few notches on my imaginary "favorite bands" list.

they just don't need the 'rock' shtick any more. they've become a lot more confident in their song writing and as a result, reaching their true potential. they play what suits the song, not what suits the fans or themselves anymore. i think this is a good thing. patterson has always had it in him. i can see how fans would be a bit upset though.

just checked these guys out. really good alt. country with no irony:) only one album?

Throw the calendar away....

who knew.

Funny you should mention that. My wife is going as well despite not liking Jay Farrar in any way. "His voice is so annoying!" We find middle ground too - Wilco, The National, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young (go figure) - but I am glad she is sucking it up and giving it a shot. Maybe the live setting will allow her to appreciate him from a different angle. We'll see. Enjoy the show Rider.

our show is sept 11, when is yours? it's in probably the best venue here in atlanta. incidently, my wife recently told me she's a huge fan of patterson hood. wtf!!!! news to me:)

A great gateway into M. Ward would be "Transfiguration of Vincent"

thanks.

yeah.

 

Conor was fucking awful then. couldn't stand him or his goatboy voice at that point.

 

but Matt & Jim killed it

goat boy...hilarious.

i've been so hot and cold with mmj. if i let myself, i can really dig at dawn, it still moves, z. they have a cool sound, but yim seems to do some goofy things with his voice that i just think ruin his songs. also, his lyrics are pretty goofy sometimes...'baby in a blender'? anyway, i'm trying to suspend judgement on some stuff lately and get into some things that could be rewarding (the national, mmj, dbt). i hope this album is good and is a gateway to m. ward and connor.

Dude.... Son Volt is so 1995.

ha ha!

my wife agreed to go. i've been telling her that jay is like a cultural icon. he will be remembered like neil young and bruce springsteen. the real deal. she says, 'will they play drown?' !!!!!!! just so you know, we do agree on lots of other stuff, gillian welch being one.

I like that last one on the page.

i hate back in the ussr.

i remember paul saying on that anthology tv special in the 90s in reference to this...'it's the beatles bloody white album. shut up!' (in a nice liverpudlian accent)

No, but I saw Dungen last night and they were wicked awesome.

dungen...hmmm.

Cheers to that. Aerosmith is legendary.

tell me what it takes...is probably one of the greatest songs of all time and definitely a gem of the late 80s. i was in my first high school band then and we used to watch that video to get inspired to write our own stuff.

as far as steven goes, i feel bad for him, and other aging rockers. how long can these guys keep it up? and is it necessary financially? i really feel we'd have a lot of the old bands still with us if they didn't feel the pressure to tour as much and make as much money. jerry garcia comes to mind. even with wilco, do they really need to tour that much? why not hit each section of the country at different times of the year. and only tour 2 months all together. how about 2 night stands or residencies? just doesn't seem necessary. i worry about dylan, neil young, and springsteen. i'd much rather see them taking it easy on the road and putting out more music. same with aerosmith.

Being a fellow Atlantan, I recommend Dr. Glass.

 

http://www.georgiasportschiropractic.com/

thanks buddy! are you going to son volt by any chance?

No clue. Was one of the first Google images that came up.

oh, i thought it was someone famous?

He should see a chiropractor about his head tilt.

seriously? i've been thinking about going to one. worth it?

(hijacking my own thread):

that's actually not true. mp3 cuts off high end and low end frequencies to make the file smaller. saying that people can't tell the difference, as such, doesn't mean to say that there isn't a difference. it's like making a meal with different ingredients, although at the end you can't pick out every flavour doesn't mean that every ingredient isn't important. equally some people just don't have the pallet to taste things properly in the first place. the point i was actually making about mp3's was actually the fact that they are easily skipable, i rarely listen to a whole song on my computer - i fast forward to the good bits, play a bit, and find something else. that's what i meant by mp3's being bad. they are also not as good in terms of sound, but that wasn't what i meant at the time.

 

if joanna newsom is unlistenable that should perhaps give you a clue to the fact that it is fairly important from the point of view of originality. i'd imagine that your parents would have called David Bowie unlistenable, whilst being ok with David Essex. there's a lesson to be learnt from that! it's stuff like her music, that people either say they love or they hate, which is the areas of the music world where you're going to find the next big thing you'll fall in love with. my advice is stay away from the middle.

good points. sorry for my reactionary comments. you are right about mp3s. i so wish the prices would come down to what they're actually worth. maybe $5 an album?

also, you're right about the middle. the middle used to better i think...70s. it's gotten progressively worse. the outliers, well, people either love them or hate them. really happy people are finding new masterpieces. i tend to fall in the latter category. however, if i have nothing nice to say, i really shouldn't say anything at all

I've often wondered if there is an inevitable point in time for every individual where all new music is a lost cause. I have a friend that listens to nothing but Tom Petty and Pearl Jam and Counting Crows. He'll never get out of his early-to-mid-90s rut.

i envy that dude. i'm much like him. ask me what i want to listen to and it's usually something from the 70s. i wasn't too aware of music until the 1980, so i have no psychic reactions to 70s music. the 80s and 90s always take me back to less that fun times. the 00s are better. for me it's basically come down to neil young, springsteen, dylan, selected classic rock, fusion, and prog rock.

He's actually reasonably thin and a great songwriter too but who's counting?

the rap/singing gets old really fast for me. i love the music though. same with joanna newsom.

Seems reasonably thin to these eyes.

who's that girl?

There is buzz about certain bands and then that buzz stops because those bands stop making great music. Bands that actually continue to make great albums continue to get a lot of press. It's as simple as that. The fact that people stop talking about Ryan Adams or blah blah blah is because they haven't made a good album in years, but that doesn't mean to say these same people that aren't talking about him anymore don't think his good albums aren't good anymore.

 

Likewise, people will only forget about Wilco if they stop touring based on their current form of albums, because they aren't very good. If they stopped touring and started making good albums then they'd be in the press again, and the buzz would start. Nobody talked about Bob Dylan through most of the 80s and the 90s - he was touring, but his albums were shit. Then he started making good music again, and he's back in forum threads again.

 

As for the other original discussion, I'd recommend checking out Ys (Joanna Newsom), Bitte Orca (Dirty Projectors), Feels (Animal Collective), Rings Around The World (Super Furry Animals) for a start - that's 4 fairly recent albums, from artists that are doing interesting/exciting things with music, and are still likely to be doing so in the future. And make sure you buy them on vinyl or cd, cos nothing sounds good on mp3 anyway.

mp3s are not bad. its a myth. research has been done showing that even 128kbs is indiscernable compared to lossless on most audio equipment. in addition, joanna newsom is utterly unlistenable and a good example of buzz being about nothing at all. NOONE would've listened to joanna newsom if not for the buzz.

I feel compelled to respond to this - especially the last couple of sentences. It is so true - I can't imagine a self-confessed 'family guy' like Jeff (or John or Glenn now, for that matter) gets a big kick out of dragging the fam all over hell's half-acre most of the year. Or maybe they do, I have no idea.

 

The best example of touring making more bucks than record sales has to be the Dead (y'all knew I was gonna mention that ). Until "In The Dark" those guys NEVER sold a million records, not even close. But they continued to play shows year after year to large crowds. There is something kind of romantic about the idea of the wandering troubadours, but sleeping in strange beds, eating shitty hotel food, etc. has to be taxing.

 

OK, that said, I don't really listen to a lot of new music. For me, it's about 90% jazz or Dead. That's keeps me pretty stoked.

that was me for about 15 years. jazz and dead and phish. in the car, it was the classic rock station. unfortunately, these days i cannot stomach phish or the dead. i wish i could, but i am just sick of it. it's neil young now. but i'm so busy looking for the next big thing, i don't listen to much neil!! god dammit!

i feel sorry for bands that have families and have to tour. however, i wonder how much is actually about making ends meet and more about financing an institution and making more money. i mean, what's the standard of living for these guys. does wilco really need to tour that much? touring killed jerry. they really didn't need to tour as much in the 90s. 10 nights on the east and west coast would've been fine. jerry would've lived much longer if he'd been able to live at david grisman's house and play with jerry band more. now, i feel like listening to the dead. go figure:)

This is essentially what happened to me. A five month Ryan Adams binge and a shiny new iPod are what helped me to discover Wilco, so the iPod was clearly important to me. Unfortunately what came after hasn't been so positive for me.

 

For the first year or so things were good. I carefully researched music to purchase, discovering some of my now favorite artists like Wilco, Son Volt, Gillian Welch, and Kathleen Edwards within a period of about 6 months. The problem came when the research ended, and I started buying up music that often only vaguely interested me. Now I've got an iPod full of albums that seemed like a good idea at the time, but I now have little desire to listen to again. It got to the point where I was browsing emusic and amazon.com every day of the week. I felt like I NEEDED something new every day of the week, yet nothing was satisfying me.

 

When I was a teenager a CD purchase was huge endeavor for me. It took numerous trips to a record store, picking up an album, examining it and putting it back on the shelf multiple times before I finally made the purchase. I remember walking between the three records stores at the mall just to admire the Sonic Youth CD's. It was at least a year before I finally requested at Sonic Youth CD as a Christmas gift.

 

Of course money was an object at that age, but I was also in awe of the music. I wanted to get things right. I didn't want to buy something I wouldn't fall in love with. You could say the loss of the romance is a part of growing up, but I think some willpower and maybe a self-imposed budget will help me. It's worth a try.

this has totally been my problem. i browse amazon and emusic everyday too. i hate it. i've downloaded so much crap that was purported to sound like neil young, it's ridiculous. torrents are another big problem. that has stopped as i'm only using my wife's macbook now. she forbids torrents:)

i was the same about cd purchases in high school. i'm not buying anything for a few weeks or a month. i'm gonna try to cut back to buying one album a month. something i really really want and in my gut i know is not fluff.

Offcial Site (with a trailer).

 

Now I am thinking of Heart Beat (1980).

 

I guess Francis Ford Coppola is never going to make his film version of On The Road.

the blurb about farrar says he's supposed to release a new gob iron lp in 2008...?

Joe Pernice just released a new album a few weeks ago.

 

The problem with The Pernice Brothers (IMHO) is that Joe Pernice has been making the same album over and over for 10 years now. I loved Overcome By Happiness - it was like a breath of fresh air and totally different. But every Pernice album sounds exactly the same. It's hard to maintain excitement over someone who keeps doing the same thing over and over.

 

I agree with you that it takes many years to see who will stand the test of time and who will be influential on new artists.

 

I haven't heard St Vincent, but I do know Bon Iver's For Emma Forever Ago album. I listened to it nonstop for about a week and really liked it at the time, but haven't gone back to it.

 

I can't say I've ever "wanted" to like an album. I'm always curious to hear new stuff, and if lots of people are talking about it, perhaps I'm even more curious, but I don't necessarily go into it "wanting" to like it.

 

And if I look back through my record/tape/CD collection, there have ALWAYS been buzz bands who disappear off the map. For every wonderful, classic album I have, I probably have two others that, while still wonderful, are by artists who have long since dropped off the map. I don't think this phenomenon is anything new. What is new is the overload of exposure to music that wasn't really possible years ago.

many good points brownie,

the rub is i want artists to do different things, but things that i like:)

your example of bon iver experience is enlightening. i find that i'll really get into something for maybe 2 hours. then i just hate it. this has happened several times with post rock, jazz, drive by truckers. also, i do 'want' to like stuff, so maybe that is an issue?

Since some of this is about my commment let's go to point two first and then back to point one. I have gotten to the point where I only like to go see local and smalltime bands since it is easier to deal with the audience and expectations are somewhat lower and these type of groups desperately need support. These groups were hit hard by rising gas prices, lower record sales, and the stiff competition that is always part of the music biz.

 

As to the first part, I have been ripped on this before here and time is finally bearing out some of my sentiment. Getting overly excited about the next big thing is fine within limits. How many buzz bands (my daughter and I still joke about the VC buzz bands) have completely dropped off the radar and into the used bins? St. Vincent is only one instance. I checked her out (as I checked out Bon Iver) so as not to be labeled the grumpy old guy (can't get around that I guess) and found her pleasent but unworthy of the adulation given. Anyone listened to the Pernice Brothers lately? That was the buzz when I got here a few years back. They seem to have dropped off the map. Music is ephermeral by its very nature. Only time will tell what is really worth listening to years from now and what is the ear candy of the moment (nothing wrong with that however, it keeps musicians working). With so much to choose from and so little universally agreed upon (due to the decline in radio fare), personal preference is going to be the sole determiner of taste from here on out. Mr. Heartbreak talks about listening to Bowie's Low, an album that has stood the test of time. This is why, just like him, I so rarely buy new CDs or LPs because the stuff that was good last year or last decade or half a century ago is now easy to find in the dustpile of history (or available for download or reissue).

 

LouieB

so so right about the buzz. paste magazine makes it's charity supported living off the buzz they in turn try to create. case in point, sujan. what's he been doing for 4 years since illinoise? now a tour and a re-working of old material? the buzz is gone my friend. unfortunately, the buzz has not died down for wilco. the praise they are getting for this new record is way out of proportion to the actual music. interviewers call jeff tweedy a superstar...oh no! wilco will probably stand the test of time though (being there, yhf). also, with all the user generated reviews of every piece of new music that comes out, it's impossible to make an informed decision anymore. someone is gonna call anything that comes out a masterpiece. personal opinion is gonna be the winner. for me, i'm finding nothing i prefer and am really pissed at myself for falling into the buzz of many many things over the last decade. bon iver being one. terrible album.