Last night I had the ambivalent pleasure of seeing Passion Pit live for the second time at Bowery Ballroom.  More than anything, I was reminded of my undying appreciatiation for the venue itself which does not posses a bad seat (standing space) in the house, a worthy accomplishment given the other NYC venue options.   My roomate asked if I could remember the first show I had seen there and I was quick to say I couldn’t remember and quicker to realize I didn’t much care to even think about it: Then. 

Now: I’m searching through my Gmail to do some detective work on concerts I’ve boughttickets/beento EVER to find out who popped my Bowery cherry.  Lucky winner?  The Stills with openers Au Revior Simone and Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin (SSLYBY for long); December 1, 2006.   I do, without the need for any more research, remember hating The Stills but the two openers were somewhat enjoyable.  Here are the ladies of Au Revior Simone channeling their best Marsha Marsha Marsha Brady:

(Photo via @sam? on flickr)

Nope, not sisters. 

On a side note, did you notice how I’m getting all legit with my images?  In our new turn here, however long or short that may be, I’m going to make an extra effort to follow some digital licensing rules here and there, respect peoples quote-un-quote rights.  Although, in my defense, it was out of sheer laziness, and awareness of the irrelevance of my blog to anyone but me and the few people I make read it which caused my initial lawlessness, no malintent (word recognized only by Urban Dictionary).

Wow, way too many digressions here. 

Sooo back to Passion Pit.  To get the administrative business out of the way, their new album, Manners, is a fun little diddy and the live show, not half bad.  The true problem with Passion Pit, well the glaring problem at least, is the lead singer’s voice.  It’s painful at times to listen to, particularly in that moment when he accidentally shifts for just a small second into his lower range at the wrong time (live only) and you know his shrill just ain’t natural.

I did some digging around today to see what the musicphiles think of the album, and I came across a review that really captured my overall sentiment about the group, except that the author needs a third category for “OR you’ll both love and hate this album at the same time to the point where you are sickly enjoying the cognitive dissonance experience.” It’s still an interesting read so I copied it below for your enjoyment/ignorement.  Plus, let’s be honest, while I’d like free tickets to shows and to dabble in mind control, writing a music review blog is just not my forte;  Can’t do music without adjectives and I really don’t DO adjectives. 

http://www.thetripwire.com/tag/michael-angelakos/

Manners

You’ll either love this album …

On the full-length debut Manners, Michael Angelakos appropriates and amplifies the elements that made Passion Pit’s Chunk of Change EP a success. He remains unabashedly loyal to his shrill voice, supplementing its high-pitched yelps with infectious pop hooks and relentless energy. Emerging last fall, Angelakos was just a sensitive northeastern frat-boy penning songs to his ex-girlfriend. The winter passes and he’s a boldly confident indie-star that records in fancy-studios with producer Chris Zane (Les Savy Fav, The Walkmen), books back-up children’s choirs, and has the sessions covered by The FADER. Out of the dorm-room into the spotlight, indeed. “Look at me,” he declares on the Red Bull-infused lead single “The Reeling”. It’s vigor sets a precedent: Chunk of Change was meant for his girlfriend’s bedroom and Manners is meant for Times Square. “The Reeling” is an attention-grabbing (“here I am! Won’t someone understand?”) and self-absorbed affair, but one that is utterly awesome. As badly as I want to roll my eyes when he mutters something about his “confounding destiny,” the all-encompassing chorus immediately trumps my cynicism.

Though bigger is definitely the operative word in describing the shift from EP to LP for Passion Pit, his girlfriend remains a dominating topic. Themes of partnership and loyalty permeate Manners as he toys with grand language and convoluted metaphors. On “Little Secrets”, he talks about “outlining wet sidewalks in halogen” before the chorus’ proclamation: “no one needs to know we’re feeling higher and higher!” “Eyes As Candles” comes off as a total love anthem while the sing-a-long “na na na” chorus epitomizes his pop sensibilities. In other cases, it seems he’s just trying to come to grips with his new attention (“my world astir and sickly”).
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The seamless flow between tracks is a product of Zane’s experience and grants Manners a strong cohesion. The songs converse with one another and ultimately make Manners sound like the product of a full band realizing their own sound.

Or you’ll hate it …

Michael Angelakos’ shrill falsetto rambles worse than before. Firstly, he sings without direction or care. The helium-sucked screams on tracks like “To Kingdom Come” and “Little Secrets” aggravate more than appeal. Secondly, his saccharine lyrics reek of vague generalities and vacuous moralizing. “So I try and I scream and I beg and I sigh just to prove I’m alive,” sings Angelakos on “Make Light”. The rest of the album is plagued in Angelakos’ self-absorbed pontifications of his purpose on this world: “everyday I lie awake and pray to God today’s the day.” Frankly, it’s hard to ever know what he’s talking about. (See: “that’s a frosty way to speak/ to tell me how to live next to your potpourri.”) Without care for syntax, grammar or general sense, his words flail amongst a cacophony of Atari-like noises and cookie-cutter pop structures.

Album launch pad “Make Light” picks up right where we left off. Angelakos shrieks unintelligible nothings like a prepubescent girl in the back seat of a long car ride. It’s truly cringe-worthy to hear Angelakos emulate Jackson 5 and belt out, “let this be our little secret/ no one needs to know we’re feeling/ higher and higher!” And Sweet Moses, is there actually a song called “Let Your Love Grow Tall”? And did he actually just affix the lyric “tall as the grass in the meadow?” to the song title? Worst is Angelakos’ self-victimizing when he boldly claims he want to “make light of my treacherous life.” Cry me a thousand rivers. “We’re swimming in a flood, you know?” No, I don’t. Chunk of Change was characterized by charmingly saccharine devotion, but Manners is full of obtuse nothings without ever being poetic.

Angelakos is putting the cart before horse. This album defines his artistic persona: an uninhibited and anxious grandstander, not unlike Brendan Flowers or Adam Levine. This is fine, if you have the hype to justify it, but Passion Pit doesn’t. Manners only confirms that “Sleepyhead” is still the best track.

Posted by Michael Cranston on May 2009

Still kickin.

Over and out.

Remember back in 1991 when the movie ”The Rocketeer” came out?  Eighteen years later, didn’t we all kinda think we’d be hovering down Madison Avenue in rocket-fueled rollerskates or yes, a jetpack?

The band has a couple of pretty good songs on Myspace and the full album comes out in June.  At least worth a listen for the name alone.

Less of my words here and instead some beautiful and truthful quotes from the “Witch of Portobello” by Paulo Coelho:

“They say that extroverts are unhappier than introverts and have to compensate for this by constantly proving to themselves how happy and content and at ease with life they are.”

“Don’t confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself.”

“Music isn’t just something that comforts or distracts us, it goes beyond that – it’s an ideology.  You can judge people by the kind of music they listen to.”

“The world revolves around mutual interests.”

“‘I’ve always found that anyone who is loved has more love to give.’”

‘Learn, but always learn with other people by your side.  Don’t be alone in the search, because if you take a wrong step you’ll have no one there to put you right.”

“…what is happiness?”  “Love, they tell me.  But love doesn’t bring and never has brought happiness.  On the contrary, it’s a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it’s sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we’re doing the right thing.  Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.”

“I spent  a lot of my life looking for happiness; now what I want is joy.  Joy is like sex – it begins and ends.  I want pleasure.  I want to be contented, but happiness? I no longer fall into that trap.”

“There are many philosophical systems – such as Taoism and Buddhism – that make no distinction between creator and creature.  People no longer try to decipher the mystery of life but choose instead to be a part of  it.”

“…we are not meant for solitude, and we only know ourselves when we see ourselves in the eyes of others.”

” For me, love fills everything. It cannot be desired because it is an end in itself.  It cannot betry because it has nothing to do with possession.  It cannot be held prisoner because it is a river and will overflow its banks.  Anyone who tries to imprison love will cut off the spring that feeds it , and the trapped water will grow stagnant and rank.”

“In that journey where suffering seemed to be the only rule, I struggled for things for which there was no point in struggling.  Like love, for example.  People either feel it or they don’t, and there isn’t a force in the world that can make them feel it.  We can pretend that we love each other.  We can get used to each other.  We can live a whole lifetime of friendship and complicity, we can bring up children, have sex every night, reach orgasm, and still feel that there’s a terrible emptiness about it all, that something important is missing.”

“In order for us to liberate the energy of our strength, our weakness must first have a chance to reveal itself.”

“When hatred makes a person grow, it’s transformed into one of the many ways of loving.”

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=219519&title=twitter-frenzy (couldn’t get this video to embed but it’s pretty damn funny commentary about Twitter from John Stewart)

I post in spurts.  I know, it’s annoying.  Either post all the time or not at all; don’t toy with our emotions they say! Well, here’s the deal - yeah, sure I’m busy, who isn’t? but even more than that, I don’t write often because I don’t always have original thoughts to share, or that I can share.  I do have a filter you know.  And in those moments of dead air, I simply shut the fuck up…

Others?

Well, they blog, or Youtube, or Facebook, or Link[ed?]in –  and now they also tweet on Twitter.  Like little birdy hiccups all day long they tweet and twat (I’m telling you, this twitter thing was probably initially conceived as some type of porn site or something) all their little irrelevant thoughts and personally I’m starting to feel overwhelmed - like being in the middle of Times Square during rush hour and suddenly the blinding light billboards begin to talk and move and attack each and every one of your remaining senses that you had safeguarded up until now.   Suddenly, in this quiet winter it feels like there is a lot of noise.

This is a total rant.  I will get over it I guess, but then again I wouldn’t be surprised if others feel the same.   Facebook just announced a new Twitter-like homepage re-design with real-time streaming so you can essentially do what you would do on Twitter on Facebook.   Frankly? I wouldn’t mind one less social media site to visit.  It will be interesting to see if Facebook can compete with Twitter.  They certainly win the numbers game with 175M users.  

Sometimes I wish there was a way to just turn it all off – stop the noise, stop the chatter, make people realize that they are spewing nonsense into more nonsense.  Maybe I’m one of the spewers, maybe not, but the possibility alone is enough to shut me up for a while.  I’m going dark kids.  I’ll keep writing because it’s something I need to do sometimes, but I think for now I need to keep my thoughts to myself…

Thanks for putting up with my bullshit and liberal propaganda.  Thanks for entertaining my half-assed theories.  If there’s one take-away I can give you about life as a blogger, it’s this: Your words become even more yours.

And no, I can’t undo. 

And no, you can’t unsee.

 Hey Ryan, if things don’t work out with Mandy, call me will ya? 

Ryan Adams: Golden Stars on Streets of Piss

By: Ryan Adams

March 02, 2009

“In the back of my mind, as my feet walked over the golden stars that line the Hollywood Boulevard, filthy, horrid and bleak, littered with crumpled McDonald’s bags and streams of piss, I thought of home, my bed in my cavernous New York apartment, walls stacked with books like a shield from my own thoughts and the sounds outside. I thought of walking the empty streets alone and about how no matter how sad I or anyone else gets there, New York seems to prop a loner up on his side and up by the bootstraps we go, we loners. Our fair city is here to remind us that we are all alone together.”

Back in 2001, Ryan Adams recorded his video for the Grammy nominated single, “New York, New York”  four days before the 9/11 attacks.  It features multiple shots of the World Trade Center towers and an homage to the city. 

It’s one thing to be hopeful, and it’s another thing to believe that you are deserved certain things beyond the basic rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Our forefathers were definitely on to something.

I have a particular disdain for formalities, a human disease spawning cases of expectation at its worst.  As I’m sure you could have guessed, I was part of the club hailing Hallmark holidays as a publicly-endorsed scam of the masses.   Why spend $5 on a stupid card that has no original thought and will likely get thrown away after an initial smile, and short-lived table stint?  If you really thought so highly of me and felt compelled to remind me on my special day, couldn’t you just tell me so in person, maybe even call me on the phone if you really feel the urge?  And truthfully,  the only thing I ever really hope (notice I said “hope” and not “expect”) to get on my birthday is an orgasm.   Everything else is just gravy, I promise.

Going to a dinner party? Sure, it’s always lovely to bring a dessert or bottle of wine.  Wait, scratch that, apparently it is expected.  As in, the hostess, who was hopefully throwing the dinner party because they wanted to share a meal with good company, is now going to gossip to all your friends if you dare not follow the dinner party “rules.” 

Take up your friend’s offer to crash in her guest room for a week and leave without gifting up a bottle of wine or candle set for your seemingly selfless host, beware the backlash.  For someone doing deeds out of the supposed kindness of their heart, they are often quick to notice when their showering of love in the form of gifts and accolades isn”t waiting on the other end, which leads me to believe they aren’t doing these things for the right reasons.

There is a huge expectation epidemic in the world of dating, too.  Boys and girls, usually, once again, doing things for the wrong reasons, follow some type of dating rulebook that is bound to leave them alone and frustrated in time.   Dating should be instinctual; if you like someone, try to spend time with them and if you still like them, see them even more.  Do that for a period of time and eventually you’ll just sorta find yourself in a relationship.  If you start letting your mind wander into what it all means and where things are going, you’re bound to get burned.  Why?  Well, male (X) may really like female (Y), but if Y starts giving off vibes that she’s waiting for a bigger commitment, X feels like he’s being tricked into something he may not even want.  Irony is, he probably does want it or would want it in time had you not started flashing your alarm system tenticles.  And if he wasn’t headed down the path of increased commitment, your demanding wasn’t going to make a bit of difference.  It will; however, make you look like a fool.  So I say relax, enjoy what it is you have, and if it’s not good enough, you have the choice to leave and find something else, but don’t sit there expecting and in turn demanding someone to be what you want them to be – it’s suffocating.

Don’t get me wrong, thoughtful actions and hopeful hints are very much appreciated if they come with pure intentions, but fall into the evil world of expectations, and you risk losing everything you were possibly even going to get in the first place – if, of course, you would just stop expecting it.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

(Manhattan apartment, sun shining in, windows open, sweet breeze, 50 degrees in February, paints, canvas, inspiration and some tunes.)

With Mother Nature on my side, today I finished my first painting since high school.  The painting bug hit again after a trip to the New Museum a few months back where I caught the works of the wonderful Miss Elizabeth Peyton.  Elizabeth Peyton is best known for her portraits of her close friends, boyfriends, pop celebrities (Gallagher brothers, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain etc) European monarchy, and has now even added a painting of Michelle Obama and daughter Sasha to the collection.  

Take a look at one of my favorite pieces by her:

Joe Goddard of Hot Chip by Jess418 (Acrylic on Canvas)

http://www.fmylife.com/

It’s only a matter of time before they get a big corporate sponsor and turn your shit excuse for a life into their seven imported luxury cars, mansion in South Hampton, and trophy wife.   Ahh, capitalism.

The hero in my world of cerebral pain is an unassuming white pill marked with the letter “E” -  Excedrin Migraine.   This stuff is my version of god, always saving me in the nick of time from becoming that wretched company that can’t think or do anything and needs to call it a night early.  That’s not what god does?  Oh. Sorry, I wouldn’t know.

The headaches happen decently often – sometimes multiple times a week.  Maybe I should go see a doctor, but I’m pretty sure my acupuncturist has a better shot at curing me with his yin and yang mumbo jumbo and a knitting needle, than the doctor does.  Plus, Excedrin works very well within minutes. 

In honor of one of my favorite drugs, second only to birth control, here is my ode to Excedrin:

       “O Excedrin, My Steed, My Valor”

Who needs a brain tumor,

When you have headaches galore?

No need to start a rumor,

I’m not an alcoholic whore.

It might be dehydration,

It might be stress,

I’d rather suffer from intoxication,

Than be under this duress.

Like a baby cow to its mother’s teet,

All hail Excedrin Migraine the Queen,

No meth lab could ever beat,

The relief I get from acetaminophen and caffeine.

Crane falling? Apartment on fire? Hudson parting like the Red Sea?

Forget the cat and the roomates, my Excedrin’s coming with me.

CNN

Headline straight from CNN.com-

“Obama: ‘I screwed up’ on Daschle appointment“

Uh, come again?

He takes “full responsibility” for the Daschle mess?

Hold on, I need a minute.

Sorry, I haven’t heard those words in nearly eight years.  It’s going to take a minute for the shock to subside and my libido to go in to overdrive.

What can I say?  I like men who admit when they’re wrong.