Eight albums/ performances.

I've been slacking on the posts for the past week or so... busy with work.. blah, blah, blah... Here is a lil something to hold ya'll over till the next post.

Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska (wma)

Trans Am - Liberation part 1
Part 2 (pw - zades)

Beulah - KCRW Session

Beulah - Peel Session

Modest Mouse - KVRX performance

The Beta Band - Three EPs (pw - burt)

Sufjan Stevens - A Very Sufjan Christmas (3 parts from Quintus)

Stars - Set Yourself on Fire

Patient just died in room 105.... Cirrhosis of the eye!!

Dr. Octagon - Dr. Octagonecologyst

The first time I listened to to cuts like "Earth People" and "Halfsharkalligatorhalfman" was in my buddy Ill Bill's Buick, sitting in the senior parking lot at T.C Williams High School. I remember the moment, because it almost immediately changed the way I listened to hip-hop. The standards were the same--verse, chorus, verse, with plenty of nasty skits in the middle--and there are electro-beat shades of his predecessors, such as Afrika Baambaata, but the wordplay and beat compositions were truly light years from most hip-hop.

Maybe it was that downtime at Creedmoor Mental Hospital, but after he tuned out following the breakup of the hardheaded seminal hip-hop group the Ultramagnetic MCs, something must have flipped Kool Keith's wig like a mescaline pizza. I can think of no other way to explain the mutant birth of Dr. Octagonecologyst. Literally assuming another personality on this record, Dr. Octagon--Kool Keith on the mike, with Dan "The Automater" Nakamura producing--transmits unearthly rhymes like tractor beams to your cranium. Then he squirms around in there, grabs some Vaseline from your medicine cabinet, and does a jig. If you can listen to this album and analyze it as anything more than a musical field trip to an insane asylum, I'll be impressed.

http://rapidshare.de/files/7628504/DR._Octagon_-_Dr._Octagonecologyst.zip.html

http://d.turboupload.com/d/152258/Dr._Octagon_-_part_2.zip.html

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - OST

If you haven't yet, go see this (great) film. In a paragraph or three, I may very well spoil it for you.

Given its subject matter, Michel Gondry's beautiful film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has a particularly visual agenda, which makes great use of the medium's most important quality: its ability to collapse the distinction between linear and synchronic plot development. Charlie Kaufman has essentially written a film's film, which is fine-- wonderful, in fact-- but what storytelling role does Eternal Sunshine leave, then, for its soundtrack?

The answer here is not much of one. Jon Brion writes a perfectly ambient score: It's undistracting, yet contains interesting sounds and ideas for those who choose to be distracted by it. But with this balance comes a powerful dependence on Eternal Sunshine's visual elements. The value of listening to Brion's score by itself-- with the exception of his thematically tongue-in-cheek "Strings That Tie to You"-- is situated in the potency of its corresponding visual nostalgia. This seems to be the logical fate of most film scores, but in the case of Eternal Sunshine, Brion's insistence on certain themes popping in and out of his textures seems particularly appropriate, as the soundtrack's fluid matrix performatizes the cinematography's mind/body collapse: In the film, Brion's organi-synthgaze postlude "Phone Calls" plays after Joel decides not to try and save his first memory of Clementine, but just to enjoy it. Here, Brion's score meets Eternal Sunshine's oculophilia halfway, and fittingly comprises one of the film's most potent scenes.

By now I trust you've at least seen the trailers for Eternal Sunshine, and yes, the song that backs it (Electric Light Orchestra's "Mr. Blue Sky") is present here, despite not finding time in the film itself. The Polyphonic Spree also contribute two heavy doses of equally sugary pop ("Light and Day" and "It's the Sun"), while Anaheim garage trio The Willowz offer two shameless, anonymous, but ultimately tolerable White Stripes rip-offs. Also present is Lata Mangeshkar's Indian spook "Wada Na Tod", which plays from the kitchen radio in Clementine's apartment in a moment of comic self-indictment: Clementine works at Barnes & Noble, which these days seems to pride itself on its peddling of "world" music releases. The song title means "Don't break your promise," and subtly hints at Clementine's final request of Joel-- that he meet her again.

And then there's the Beck track, a cover of The Korgis' "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime". Beck did a really fine job reworking the original, and here's why: The song appears at three critical junctures in Eternal Sunshine when Joel feels trapped by the bitterly ironic circumstances of his memory erasure. Beck's cover logically cannot encompass "love's multiple dimensions" in the same way as the original version, as it would make for an odd juxtaposition: From Joel's perspective, love has only one side, its unrequitedness and devastation. In these moments, love is hardly "a journey always worth taking."

Fittingly, Beck revoices all the chords to be decidedly less bright and colorful, and with this move, he changes the tone of the song's repetitive lyrics from their originally bittersweet positivity to a perfectly contradictory melancholy. When Beck sings, "Change your heart," we know very well that Joel does not have the power to change his own. This is the song's beautiful ironic tension, which is used to fantastic effect in the movie's final scene: Joel and Clementine's mutual emotional attraction ultimately gives way to reason. It's triumph of reason over human emotion, summed up perfectly by their laughter-- Gondry's final nod to Nietzsche, who said (roughly) that laughter signifies the death of an emotion. Beck's song starts here again: Joel and Clementine have finally learned, and what they've learned comprises the film's disarmingly icy pessimism.

http://rapidshare.de/files/5249614/eternal.rar.html

http://rapidshare.de/files/5256535/sunshine.rar.html

http://rapidshare.de/files/5233617/spotless.rar.html


More selections:

Various Artists - This Bird Has Flown: A 40th Anniversary Tribute to the Beatles' Rubber Soul

Ultramagnetic MC's - Critical Beatdown
pw - dookie

Bonny "Prince" Billy - I See a Darkness
pw- burt

Dj Shadow - The Private Repress
pw - www.illfrequency.org

Black Flag - Damaged
part 2

Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine (original Brion-produced version)

Dakota Fanning is the Antichrist.

It is an indisputable fact that Dakota Fanning is waaaay too famous. It is also indisputable that she is in cahoots with someone far more evil than your average Hollywood producer or manager…because not even devil underling Joe Simpson could develop such a prolific career out of seemingly nothing but a never-ending smile. This is going to be hard, but the world must know the truth: Dakota Fanning is the Antichrist.

Think of how many movie roles and TV guest star slots there are for thirty-three-year-old women. Now imagine what it would be like if 97% of those available roles went to Jennifer Aniston (although in the week leading up to the premiere of Derailed, it kind of seems like they already do). If that were the case, we'd all have to be brainwashed to keep watching... yet millions still tune in to each visual holocaust Dakota appears in.

Fanning is creepy in spades, but people never seem to get sick of her. With each appearance, impressionable children are drawn to the dark side. Fanning is the same size as a real kid, but her poise is eerily grown-up. Have you ever seen her on a talk show? Along with an occasional (rehearsed) story about her jacked-up teeth, she'll chat about her next "project", or how great it was to work with this actor or that director. If you close your eyes, it's easy to imagine that you're listening to some old showbiz hag rather than an innocent third-grader. I managed to catch the little devil on Regis not long ago; girlfriend's got bigger bags under her eyes than Yasmine Bleeth after a cocaine binge. She probably drinks coffee, and it is only a matter of time before she is photographed wearing massive sunglasses and chain-smoking poolside at the Chateau Marmot.

Further evidence of Dakota Fanning’s wickedness lies in her ability to destroy the reputations of actors who were previously respected by men as universally awesome.

Cases in Point:

#1) Robert DeNiro
DeNiro used to be a man’s man. He not only portrayed kick-ass characters like Jake LaMotta and Don Corleone, but he embodied a persona that was both mysterious and at the same time tough as nails. His default expression was a determined scowl, like he was prepared to introduce you to the business end of his shoe if you looked at him wrong. Then he starred alongside Fanning in Hide and Seek - now he is a full blown pussy and corporate shill.

#2) Kris Kristofferson
Somewhere between becoming a Rhodes Scholar, penning "Bobby McGee", performing with The Highwaymen, and slaying boatloads of vampires alongside Wesley Snipes in Blade, Kristofferson had firmly established himself as a man among boys. With his grizzled beard and growling voice he demonstrated the rugged manliness of a lumber jack, with a supreme intellect to boot. What hath become of the brutish Kristofferson? Well, he hammered the last nail in the coffin carrying his tough-guy image by joining little Dakota in Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story. He used to eat rocks and shit gun powder, now he’s nothing but a minion left in the wake of Fanning’s assault on real men.
#3) Tom Cruise
Sike…He’s always been a pussy.

With the help of Lucifer, she'll never age - like Jonathan Lipnicki after Jerry Maguire. That movie was out eight years ago and he still looks like a he could do a Life cereal commercial. Or maybe Fanning's natural hormones will turn her into a toothsome young thing, and transition her from Cat in the Hat pigtailed annoyance to low-rise jeans and crop toped media mogul Hilary Duff-level annoyance. Either way, the outlook is grim.

I know what you are thinking – “But Terry, she is so cute and just a child and therefore should be beyond reproach!!” For those detractors I have but one response:

Iron & Wine | Calexico - In the Reins

In 2001, Sam Beam, who records under the name Iron & Wine, and Calexico's Joey Burns and Don Convertino kicked around the idea of collaborating on an album. They didn't find the time for the project until late 2004, when Beam packed up his guitar and followed the ribbons of road to Tuscon, Calexico's home base. There, he recorded In the Reins, with Burns and Convertino.

This is a country album. Not country as in "I lost my truck and my wife hates me because my girlfriend's a better hunter" or "I can't get over you till you get out from under him" country, it's country because it is so solidly grounded in rural life. The album brims with rural and natural images. Wide open skies, bridges, cicadas in the trees, birds on branches, and on "Red Dust"... well red dust.

In the Reins draws on the unique strengths of both bands. Sam Beam started his career alone in his bedroom with nothing but a four-track. There, he made lo-fi recordings of his songs and defined what would become his musical signature -telling stories filled with striking imagery and singing in hushed, cottony tones. On Our Endless Numbered Days, he used the evocative, and slightly macabre image of teeth in the grass, to suggest how death haunts our daily lives. His prowess for painting complex pictures continues on In the Reins.

Burns and Convertino's decision to name themselves after a border town was apt. They've become know for creatively blending indie rock with the sounds of the Southwest and Mexico. With their command of different musical traditions, Calexico weaves a rich sonic tapestry, and the multiple musical threads shimmer as a fitting backdrop for Beam's stories. The depth and richness of the music amplifies the depth and richness of Beam's lyrics with eloquence.

I left rural Georgia because wide open skies and drawn out days, while beautiful, often bled into boredom. I like the fast paced, man-made rhythms of the city, and living stacked in a row next to my neighbors. So I don't naturally gravitate toward albums that chime with enthusiasm for the American pastoral. Yet after just a couple listens, In the Reins had reeled me in.

I like this album because it's often poetic, but it is not innocent, and never naive. On one song it slyly revels in the pleasures of a first sexual adventure, on other songs, it rings equally with admirable emotions such as love and less admirable ones such as jealousy. It knows that the rural life is anything but the simple life, and it's enough to make this city boy pine for a dirt road, a cold quiet night, and a starry sky.

Iron & Wine Calexico - In the Reins - http://d.turboupload.com/d/133556/Iron__Wine_-_Calexico__In_the_Reins.zip.html

Note… Iron & Wine along with Calexico just announced a show at DC’s 9:30 Club on November 30th. Tickets are still available. http://www.930.com/