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"In time the snow will rise..."

Track 3: Sufjan Stevens, "That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!"

Did you know that Sufjan Stevens has made 3 albums worth of Christmas music? It fits quite well—so well, in fact, that it's almost as if Christmas carols and Sufjan were made for each other: Christian + banjo + airy voice & harmonies = carolers!

But, whether or not you're annoyed by the idea of carolers showing up at your door singing, this is good stuff. And I'll bet you wouldn't mind Sufjan showing up outside your door in a Santa hat, would you?

"The smile on your face, a tear in your eye..."

Track 2: Orange Juice, "Holiday Hymn"

And now, for some indie pop from Scotland. No, not fucking Franz Ferdinand! Just the band that provided them inspiration for their entire dance-pop oeuvre! [1]

If you don't know Orange Juice: remember that song, "A Girl Like You", by a fellow named Edwyn Collins? It was quite popular in the mid-90s.

Well, anyway, Orange Juice were Edwyn's band in the late 70s/early 80s. They were—and are—critically acclaimed, but as is so often the case, not particularly popular in terms of record sales. And in fact, it's pretty much impossible to find their 2 first albums—"You Can't Hide Your Love Forever" and "Rip it Up"—anywhere.

"Holiday Hymn" is a cover of a Subway Sect song. It's from their (discarded) first album, Ostrich Courtyard, which was collected on the compilation The Glasgow School, released just this year, which also includes a bunch of their early singles.

This isn't my absolute favorite of their songs, but it's fairly representative: jangly guitars, somewhat wobbly & mournfully fey vocals.

Ah, those vocals. This review in the Guardian provides one of the best summaries ever of Edwyn's vocals:

Weaker tunes would certainly have buckled beneath Edwyn Collins' unique approach to vocals. A couple of months ago, the website where Grace Collins has courageously documented her husband's recovery from a cerebral haemorrhage reported that he had been singing again, adding that "his tuning needs working on". "Grace," one fan gently replied, "his tuning always did need work." In fact, you could spend all day throwing adjectives at Collins' voice on The Glasgow School and still not come up with a satisfactory description. Occasionally, he sounded like a Caledonian Bryan Ferry attempting to croon while balancing marbles on his tongue and stifling a fit of the giggles. Usually he sounded more peculiar than that.

Buy The Glasgow School.

[1] Though to their credit, FF do tend to admit it: they're basically the reason why The Glasgow School was released this year, because they're always promoting Orange Juice (or at least, the memory of same). Which is very sweet. Thanks, Alex Kapranos et al!

"Trying very hard to sin..."

Track 1: Sparks, "Thank God It's Not Christmas"

My opinion: this is the perfect start to any holiday mix.

I'm not taking credit for the brilliance, mind you—all of the credit goes to Ron and Russell Mael. But really: could you imagine anything more fun than these operatic vocals? More fitting—for the whole holiday season, & Christmas—than the somewhat troubled undertones of the lyrics against the immensely anthemic pop music?

No: this is perfect, in that really fucked up & weird way that Sparks perfected oh so long ago!

Buy Kimono My House.

And for something fun & bizarre, take a look at this photo shoot of Ron and Russell at the Louvre. Make sure to read the captions underneath the photos, like this:

An amateur artist is trying to reproduce Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The work is not so bad but Ron Mael has discovered what is wrong: The forger uses Cobalt blue instead of Prussian Blue. What a pitiful mistake!

Those crazy brothers!

Don't let the bells end!

For the past couple of years, I've made mix albums for my family [1]. But they've always just basically been collections of my favorite songs of the year. Which, while fine, always left something wanting: it is, after all, the holiday season, and what could better speak to the twisted & tangled emotions of said season than a holiday mix, full of songs about the holidays?

So, this year, that's what I've made. 10 songs, all about the holidays (or reminding me of them—you'll see, when we get there).

Charlie Brown christmas tree, as very obvious symbol of generally disenfranchised individual.

& because I'm a very lazy bastard, I'm going to write about them on this blog, and I'm going to spread them out into 10 separate posts. What better way to fill up 10 (+1) posts in December? After all, I've got a 4-month-old tradition of posting regularly to this blog, and I've got to keep that up!

I'm also going to be experimenting with posting MP3s of each of these songs. Based on my own experience—I read a ton of MP3 blogs, and the more I read, the more music I buy at proper music stores—this will only lead more people to buy these songs, rather than simply stealing them. [2] That said, I have a fairly conflicted internal relationship with posting music online, mainly because I don't know whether I'm a very representative sample w/r/t my music purchasing habits.

So, in other words: make me proud, people.

I'll start tomorrow, and I'll also keep this post updated with links to each of the tracks. Which are:

1. Sparks, "Thank God It's Not Christmas"
2. Orange Juice, "Holiday Hymn"
3. Sufjan Stevens, "That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!"
4. The Darkness, "Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)"
5. Pixies, "Holiday Song"
6. De La Soul, "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa"
7. Prince, "Another Lonely Christmas"
8. Low, "Blue Christmas"
9. The Pogues, "Fairytale of New York"
10. Take That, "Back For Good"

[1] last year's, along with ruminations on same.

[2] I'll also be downsampling them to 96Kbps, which still generally gives a good-enough representation of the song, but without being CD quality. And maybe I'll delete them 10 minutes after posting them, just for fun.

Congratulations to U2 for another wholly unexpected GRAMMY nomination!

Krissy dissects this year's GRAMMY nominations, which are, frankly, as depressing as ever.

Not only are the albums & bands nominated as ridiculously boring & obvious as ever—it's almost as if they have a list of artists who they'll give GRAMMYs too, and they go down that list, saying "did he release anything this year? Nope. Did she release anything? Yep, she's nominated!"—but it's just all so fucking soulless.

It's as if they've taken music, squeezed all the life out of it, & then judged it on a set of computerized rules. Note that I'm not anti-computer, obviously. But music awards in general have always struck me as particularly useless—in fact, their only use for me is in finding things I may have missed during the year. For example, Stylus Magazine's Top 50 Singles of 2005 list, which contains a lot of stuff I've already got, and a lot I don't and would probably like. So that's interesting to me.

But when you take a set of awards like the GRAMMYs, which are geared at essentially making music recommendations for the most boring people in the world, that's just so very dull.

I mean, it's apparent just in their published criteria for the individual categories. For example, this note for a bunch of their "Best Album" awards:

(For albums containing 51% or more playing time of VOCAL tracks.)

Do they actually measure it, do you think?

"She asked me if we could be friends..."

So, I recorded Sign o' the Times on our TiVo this past weekend, and ever since I've been trying to figure out how to get it off of the TiVo. As in, off of the TiVo, and onto a DVD or my (Mac) laptop.

But so BTW, before I delve into the tech stuff, a brief aside that's worthy of the main post, as opposed to a footnote: Sign o' the Times is so fucking awesome. And it's not really easily available on DVD, which is just totally lame.

Favorite things about Sign o' the Times:

• When, during "Hot Thing," Prince slides across the stage under Cat Glover's legs, and rips off her skirt with his teeth. (Or, I guess, almost—he actually appears to grab it with his hand, then transfer it to between his teeth. Yes, I've now watched this part too many times in the writing of this post.) But still: how awesome is Prince!


• This movie is just so brilliantly directed. The cuts & closeups are as good as a music video, which is pretty incredible with what appears to be concert footage. [1]


• This is a really great mini-review of the movie. Of course, it would be, as the author wrote a book on the subject.
  


• "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man". Best. Song. EVAR.

So, all of that said: We only have Macs around the house (around 6 of them now that we've amassed, but quantity doesn't help, in this case), so we can't use TiVoToGo. And really, what I most want is just to be able to burn this to a DVD, so I can watch it over & over again. It seems so simple: it's a file, made of bits, on a hard drive on (what is basically) a Linux box, that is on our fucking network. Why can't I just mount the box and copy the file to my laptop, then play it? [2]

So finally, from a comment on this post, I figured out part of the answer:

Open up a web browser and go to https://(the ip address of your tivo)/nowplaying/index.html and login as tivo with a password of your media access code (from the Tivo view settings screen) It will let you access a website where you can download the *.tivo files of your shows.

Yay! Now I have the .tivo file, though I can't actually do anything with it without a PC with TiVo ToGo.

And yet somehow, just the idea of having this file on my own hard drive makes me feel so much more secure!

Prince: you're safe now.

[1] Of course, it's not actually concert footage, which is the reason it looks so good. It turns out it's a lot easier when you reshoot the entire movie at your own studio!

[2] This is a rhetorical question.

"And I love what you've done with your hair... oh yeah!"

I love it when music makes me happy! & tonight, it's been doing just that.

I heard The Ark's "Echo Chamber" when it was posted on Fluxblog a year and a half ago, totally loved it, & I've been looking for We Are the Ark at record stores ever since (unsuccessfully) [1].

So anyway, I was thrilled to read tonight on The Tofu Hut that The Ark have a new album, "State of the Ark" [2], which is streamable on The Ark's official website.

And also, & on a related note, I picked up the new Darkness album yesterday, and it's just brilliant—they're embracing their inner Queen even more than before. [3] This post does a better job than I could of describing how awesomely rawk the Darkness are (& also raves quite a bit about The Ark).

[1] I could've just bought it off of Amazon, but I hate paying import prices for music that should rightly have been released in the US. It just doesn't seem fair!

[2] Which has been out in Europe for awhile, and which may (?) be released in the US in 2006.

[3] I had only heard snippets of "One Way Ticket," the first single, before buying the album—and I seriously thought I'd accidentally bought the wrong CD when it started with a fucking panflute. But it's all part of the fun!