SOUNDTRACK: SILVERSUN PICKUPS-Live at KEXP October 27, 2006 (2006).
I liked Silversun Pickups’ album Swoon quite a bit. True, the singer sounds uncannily like Billy Corgan, but the shoegazer swirls of music were so sonically interesting that I couldn’t resist.
The lead singer/frontman is very funny and very engaging–he has great patter, and it’s clear that they all feel comfortable at KEXP (who were major promoters of the band). This set comes from their first album, which I don’t know at all. And I found it a little samey.
The production–washes and layers of music kind of flattened it out a bit. It’s true that the melodies are good and his voice is compelling in the way that Billy Corgan’s is, but this set just never sticks with me. I don’t know if that’s to do with the songs from the first album or if maybe live they’re not that interesting, but I didn’t love this set as much as I wanted to.
You can hear it here and a bunch more sets from them here.
[READ: October, 10, 2012] “Fire at the Ativan Factory”
Now that I’ve finished with Vonnegut for a while, I was planning on turning my attention to some new books, and then I stumbled upon this short story by Douglas Coupland–another author whose oeuvre I plan to read (I’ve actually read most of his books already, but they were over a decade ago so I’m going to go through them again).
Douglas Coupland is not one for short stories. As far as I can tell this is one of the few stories he has published. (this is going by Wikipedia, because his own homepage, which one would assume would celebrate all things Coupland, leaves out quite a lot of things). This short story was published in a U.K. released fin de siècle compilation called Disco 2000. I’ve never heard of the collection. And I certainly wasn’t going to hunt too hard to track it down, even if there are a bunch of interesting writers in it (end of the century malaise is so twelve years ago). But fortunately and somewhat inexplicably to me, Barcelona Review has a full text copy (in English and Spanish(!)) on their site. (more…)
