Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Broken Bells’ Category

D.B.S. Maxwell–“Beer Cans: A Guide for the Archaeologist” (Historical Archaeology, Vol 27, No. 1 1993)

Posted in Austin City Limits, Band of Horses, Beer, Broken Bells, D.B.S. Maxwell, Essays, Gogol Bordello, Historical Archaeology, History, LCD Soundsystem, Muse, Scholarship, Sonic Youth, Spoon, The Flaming Lips, Vampire Weekend, Yeasayer on November 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: AUSTIN CITY LIMITS FESTIVAL 2010 (on Palladia TV 2011).

Recently Palladia broadcast some highlights from the Austin City Limits Festival in 2010.  The bands they showed were Phish, The Flaming Lips, Vampire Weekend, Muse, LCD Soundsystem, Sonic Youth, Spoon and Slightly Stoopid.

There were so many good bands at this festival (why is Richard Thompson in such small print?) that I won’t really complain about the inclusion of Slightly Stoopid and LCD Soundsystem on this best of (but they could have included Band of Horses, Yeasayer, Broken Bells, Gogol Bordello (the list goes on!).  (I’d never heard of Slightly Stoopid and although I like LCD Soundsystem, live they were less than stellar).  Although I am glad they didn’t include the Eagles, thank you very much.

I’m trying to get actual set lists of these airings (they mentioned the song titles during the show but I didn’t write them down).

This was a 2-hour broadcast and it was really good.  If they re-air the episode, it’s worth watching.  The quality of the broadcast is excellent (even if the HD format does take up way too much space on a TiVo).

[READ: November 6, 2011] “Beer Cans: A Guide for the Archaeologist”

A while back I read a few old articles that I got from JSTOR, the online archiving resource.  This month, I received some links to three new old articles that are available on JSTOR.  So, since it’s the holiday weekend, I thought it would be fun to mention them now.

And to start of the holidays, I present you with this–a loving history of the beer can (for archaeologists).

This is a fairly fascinating look at the development of the beer can from 1935 to the present.  The selling point of the article is that archeologists could use beer cans to date the timeframe of an excavation.  I agree with this; however, since they only date back to 1935, I’m not entirely convinced of its long-term usefulness.

The problem with the article is that page two shows a chronological timeline.  This in itself is not a problem (although it is odd that it goes from present to 1935 instead of chronologically forward); the problem is that the article itself more or less sates exactly the same thing as the timeline.  For although this article is 20 pages long, there are tons of photos and very little in the way of text beyond what was in that (very thorough) time line.

Nevertheless, you can see the morphing of beer cans from ones that you had to pop open with a can opener to ones that finally had self opening cans.  See the switch from tin to aluminum, and even learn why the tops of cans are a little narrower than the sides (called a neck-in chime, it evidently saves a lot of money). (more…)

Read Full Post »

Marni Jackson–“Bob Dylan Goes Tubing” (The Walrus, July/August 2007)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Bob Dylan, Broken Bells, Canadian Content, Funny (ha ha), Funny (strange), Marni Jackson, Short Story, Summer, The Walrus on May 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: BROKEN BELLS Live at SXSW, March 17, 2010 (2010).

The only disappointing thing about this download from NPR’s All Songs Considered is that it consists of only three songs now.  I guess the band (or more likely the label) didn’t want the whole show streaming or downloadable, so they let us have three songs (the original show was ten).

But three is better than nothing.  The excerpt includes “The High Road,” “The Ghost Inside” and “October.”

The band sounds great in this setting.  I’m unclear just who all is playing live, but the page says that the live band is a six piece (with Danger Mouse jumping from drums to keyboards and back again).  They reproduce the songs very well, but at the same time they’re not just mimicking the album.

It’s a nice teaser to want to see them live.

[READ: April 4, 2011] “Bob Dylan Goes Tubing”

Today is Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday.  It’s not often that I get a story that coincides with a day quite so nicely.  Happy birthday, Bob.

This begins as a delightfully weird little story and develops into a strangely profound story about family and celebrity.

A family is renting a vacation home by Lake Sturgeon for the summer.  The mother notices a man on a raft who is floating towards them.  And she says that from a distance the guy looks like Bob Dylan, only older.  (He is older, her husband ponts out).

When the man gets closer, he reveals himself to indeed be Bob Dylan.  Well, he doesn’t reveal himself to be Dylan, he just is Dylan. And he accepts their hospitality and doesn’t make a fuss.  He thinks that he’s on a different lake (Lake Kashagawigamog), but he seems content where he is.

And that’s when their son Ryan, introduces him to the fun of tubing.

There is a lot of humor to the story (it was a National Magazine Award Nominee in the humor category), but it’s not a very funny story.  Obviously the premise of Bob Dylan tubing s quite funny, but as the story continues its proves itself to be not so funny.

For Dylan won’t leave. He stays in their house, and the family is basically paying for his food and cigarettes.  (Okay, that is quite funny).  He’s a good companion for the family (especially Ryan, whom he is teaching to play guitar), but he has never once offered to pay for anything.  (No even a cheque when he leaves?)

As the story and the summer draw to a close, some of Dylan’s loneliness is revealed.  And the story ends on a poignant yet positive note.

It’s really quite a nice story.  I wonder what won the Award that year.

It’s available here.

Read Full Post »

David Foster Wallace–The Broom of the System (1987)

Posted in Air, Big Books, Books about writers, Broken Bells, Danger Mouse, David Foster Wallace, Drinking, Drugs, Ennio Morricone, Fears, Fun Boy Three, Funny (ha ha), Funny (strange), Gilligan's Island, Language, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marriage Trouble, Nature, Neurotics, The Future, The Shins, Travel, Universities, Word usage on November 1, 2010| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: BROKEN BELLS-Broken Bells (2010).

When I first played this disc I was really disappointed by it.  I’ve grown to expect crazy magic from Danger Mouse, and I assumed that this collaboration with James Mercer of The Shins would be crazy awesome.  But it seemed very mellow to me.  Mellow in a way that just kind of sat there.  So I put it aside for a while.

Then I listened to it again a little later and I found that I really liked it this time.  In fact, it rapidly grew into one of my favorite releases of 2010.

The disc is a wonderfully paced mixture of acoustic guitars, interesting keyboard sounds and, often, downright bizarre electronic choices (subtle, yet bizarre).  The weird sounds that open the disc, a kind of backwards keyboard, are disorienting but also very catchy.  And the song itself is instantly familiar.  It’s followed by “Vaporize” a simple acoustic number that bursts out with some great organ and (very) distorted drums.  It also features a fascinating horn solo!

“Your Head is on Fire” settles things down a bit with a mellow track which, after some cool introduction, sounds like a  pretty typical sounding Shins track (ie, very nice indeed–and more on this in a moment).

“The Ghost Inside” feels like a ubiquitous single.  I’m not sure if it is or if it’s just so catchy (with dancey bits and hand claps and a great falsetto) that it should be everywhere.  “Sailing to Nowhere” reminds me, I think, of Air.  And the great weird drums/cymbals that punctuate each verse are weird and cool.

One of the best songs is “Mongrel Heart” it opens with a western-inspired sound, but quickly shifts to a quiet verse.  The bridge picks up the electronics to add a sinister air (and all of this is accompanied by nice backing vocals, too).  But it’s the mid section of the song that’s really a surprise: it suddenly breaks into a Western movie soundtrack (ala Morricone) with a lone trumpet playing a melancholy solo.  And this surprise is, paradoxically, somewhat typical of the disc: lots of songs have quirky surprises in them, which is pretty cool.

Having said all this, there are a few tracks where it feels like the two aren’t so much collaborating as just playing with each other.  And that may have been my initial disappointment.  I was expecting a great work from a combined powerhouse, and I think what we get is two artists writing great stuff while seemingly respecting each other too much to step on each others toes.

There is another Broken Bells disc in the works.  And I have to assume that they’ll feel more comfortable with each other and simply knock our socks off next time.  But in the meantime we have this really wonderful disc to enjoy.

[READ: October 21, 2010] The Broom of the System

It dawned on me sometime last summer that I had never read DFW’s first novel.  I bought it not long after reading Infinite Jest and then for some reason, never read it.  And by around this time I had a not very convincing reason for not reading it.  DFW seemed to dismiss his “earlier work” as not very good.  I now assume that he’s referring to his pre-Broom writings, but I was a little nervous that maybe this book was just not very good.

Well I need not have worried.

It’s hard not to talk about this book in the context of his other books, but I’m going to try.  Broom is set in the (then) future of 1990.  But the past of the book is not the same past that we inhabited.  While the world that we know is not radically different, there is one huge difference in the United States: the Great Ohio Desert.  The scene in which the desert comes about (in 1972) is one of the many outstanding set pieces of the book, so I’ll refrain from revealing the details of it.  Suffice it to say that the desert is important for many reasons in the book, and its origin is fascinating and rather funny. (more…)

Read Full Post »