that someone is me
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
Pork Buns at Momufuku and Elvis Costello are the Shimm
I try not throw the word shimm around here too loosely. Not everything is the shimm that is posted on the Shimm. Of course, my music postings are of the highest quality. This is my favorite thing to eat in New York @ Momofuku. That pork is really incredibly delicious and that bun is the highest quality bun I've encountered. this is the kind of stuff worth incurring a heart attack for. And I like this relatively new song from Elvis Costello and Attractions off his most recent album Momofuku, which is reminiscent of the old Elvis Costello of his first 4 years/4 albums. I'm not saying that Momofuku is as good, but songs like "Stella Hurt" demonstrate that he still has the songwriting chops and the vocal ability to rock effectively. It's noisy, it's jagged and it's almost definitive Elvis Costello. Thursday, September 25, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
The Shimm presents...Instrumental Jams of the Week
Fujiya & Miyagi, following up on the pretty stellar Transparent Things, have got a new album out called Lightbulbs. Sad to say, F&M (not Japanese but in fact British, not a duo but actually a quartet) are treading water--Lightbulbs just isn't very good. There a couple of good tracks though, "Hundreds & Thousands" is one of them. That's why you to come to The Shimm, folks. I sift through this stuff to find the shimm cuts, so you don't have to. The new Ratatat album, LP3, is a whole lot better. Arguably, Ratatat can be repetitive. But like Stereolab, you know when you're listening to Ratatat even if you've never heard the tune before. "Falcon Jab" is one of the better cuts on the album. I can't say whether i like the original or the Copy remix better.
Friday, September 19, 2008
The Shimm presents New Music by... Kings of Leon -- 17
"17" is my current favorite track on the new Kings of Leon album Only By the Night. Lead singer Caleb Followill is derided by jealous music critics--these boys are living the dream--for writing stupid lyrics. Maybe that's the case but half the time I can't tell what he's saying anyways. Not that it really matters all that much. Vampire Weekend, they ain't. Their strengths do not lie in deep introspection but neither is this full-blown cock rock, it lies somewhere between. Kings of Leon might be the Cheap Trick of this decade. It's pop rock, let's not forget.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Entourage -- Episode 2 End Credits
"If I ever feel better" by Phoenix was used during the final scene and end credits of the second episode entitled Unlike a Virgin.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Jamie Lidell -- Another Day
I'm a little late on this one. Jim came out earlier this year. For those that really liked "Multiply" off his previous album but were disappointed by the rest of the album, I hear you. "Another Day" is Lidell's chance to vamp on Stevie Wonder, instead of Otis Redding, and it's a great tune. Lidell's got a great voice, undeniably. But it's also clear that Lidell's material doesn't always play to his strengths as a singer. Over the course of an album, he's too restless to play the role of the late 60's Motown/Atlantic blue-eyed soul man, which is a shame. Rodriguez
Joe Tangari at Pitchfork just reviewed Sixto Rodriguez's rereleased Cold Change. Haven't heard of it? Me neither, I was only familiar with "Sugar Man" which is an underground classic. Except that it turns out Cold Change wasn't a total flop, see below for greater detail, Sixto became a huge star in South Africa and elsewhere (just not here in the States):"The hardest thing about telling the story of Sixto Rodriguez is deciding whether to start in Mexico, South Africa, Australia, or Detroit. He was born in Detroit to Mexican immigrant parents and spent his entire musical career there in the 1960s and early 70s. Rodriguez made two albums of socially conscious rock, which flopped, in part because his label, Sussex, was distributed by Buddah Records, an AM radio powerhouse that had little access to the adventurous FM spectrum for which Rodriguez's music was better suited.
Though he was shut out from his audience at home, a curious thing happened in the Southern Hemisphere. The blunt urban commentary and the unique sound of his debut, Cold Fact, struck a chord in Australia and New Zealand, to the degree that in 1979 and 1980, Rodriguez, who had built himself as a musician playing dives, gay bars, strip clubs, and other out-of-the-way corners of Detroit, was able to mount a theater tour in Australia. The real surprise, though, was lying thousands of miles across the Indian Ocean, in South Africa, where Cold Fact became a counterculture hit and was accepted as a rock classic. It sold about 60,000 copies during the Apartheid era (very good numbers for South Africa) and was bootlegged many more times than that."
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/145294-rodriguez-cold-factTuesday, September 16, 2008
the Shimm apologizes for being overly partisan
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? [9.9.08]
By Jonathan Haidt
JONATHAN HAIDT is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he does research on morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.---
But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.....
But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.
....
But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: "disgusts me" (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and "disgusts me less" (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers ).
For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog).
This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet."
---
When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?
---
(getting so deep, I cannot pretend to understand what he's talking about, but cannot help but think that he's probably right)
A Durkheimian ethos can't be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest.
In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don't understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.
Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle of converting unrelated individuals into a group. Durkheim long ago said that God is really society projected up into the heavens, a collective delusion that enables collectives to exist, suppress selfishness, and endure. The three Durkheimian foundations (ingroup, authority, and purity) play a crucial role in most religions. When they are banished entirely from political life, what remains is a nation of individuals striving to maximize utility while respecting the rules. What remains is a cold but fair social contract, which can easily degenerate into a nation of shoppers.
The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words "God" and "faith." But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals—each with a panoply of rights--but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring. Our national motto is e pluribus unum ("from many, one"). Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity and identity of the collective (such as multiculturalism, bilingualism, and immigration), they show that they care more about pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap.
----
New TV on the Radio -- some serious shimm going on
this album cover just sucks! WTF???! The band spent so much time making a pretty good f&*%ing album and this was the best they could do??? This is my favorite, hands down, the best TV on the Radio album. And it's not messy or unnecessarily noisy. Now, full disclosure, I only think 7 songs are worth listening to, but these are some seriously shimm tunes. Swiftboating Hockey Moms
thanks to Brad for finding this on youtube. there needs to be a word for a video on youtube. anyone like the word, "youtubeo"?
Kings of Leon -- Only By the Night
The Kings of Leon will have a new album Only By the Night, out in stores next week, Sept. 23. Predictably, Pitchfork dissed it savagely. I didn't love Because of the Times. So far, I think I like Only By the Night better (except that no song on the new album is as good as "Knocked Up.") Or maybe it's that my expectations of the band have changed. The Skynard-meets-the Strokes sound is pretty much all gone, but KOL have also dialed down some of their affection for the Killers/modern rock influences that plagued Because of the Times on this new album. Listening to songs like "Cold Desert" and "Use Somebody," I can sort of understand why Pitchfork reviewer Ian Cohen dismisses KOL. And while a lot of their fans will probably like these song are a little overly bombastic and predictable, dare I say, a little too professional. I thought "Notion" was a keeper.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
I got the football blues...oy veh
In order to divert my attention from the shitty Indianapolis Colts offense (oy veh), I'm posting songs that have recently caught my attention. It might be noted that this Alphabeat tune "What is Happening?" is off of an import-only album that costs 45 clams. It sounds like the work of a solo artist--like one of those singer songwriter albums, but from the album cover I'd say this is a collaborative effort. Truth is, I don't know jack about Alphabeat, except that this isn't their only album. But Richard Buckner is a singer-songwriter from Lubbock, Texas. I might have posted this before or maybe not. And that Fratellis tune is a straight-forward euro-garage-rocker.Saturday, September 13, 2008
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Wye Oak -- Are you feeling it out there, readers of the Shimm?
The primo-alterna-bloggerati was at least slightly aflutter about Wye Oak when If Children was released in April of this year. And for good reason, this might be shoegazer music (so describes Amazon.com), but I find nothing at fault with Jenn Wasner's vocals and the music on "Obituary." It reminds of Yo La Tengo, the Breeders and maybe Beach House (both are male and female duos, I do believe, fronted by female vocalists...so maybe that last comparison is facile, but both benefit from doing more with less.)--all reference points that I think are the Shimm. I swear this isn't boring music. Give a look-sy, hear-sy (by the way, I am inventing this expression, "look-sy, hear-sy" as of right now).Wednesday, September 10, 2008
MGMT -- Time to Pretend
My brother is a big fan of MGMT, and he's been badgering me to post some MGMT for the longest time. But I'm a stubborn fellow, and, rather than take his word for it, I waited for "Time to Pretend" to pop up on my iPod (I keep it on shuffle, most times). I recall that right before I left for Boston, my bro played "Time to Pretend," a song he said he liked to listen to with his son, my nephew Ashley, who is all of two years old. I'm posting the lyrics on this tune. You tell me whether or not my brother has questionable parenting skills.
I'm feeling rough, I'm feeling raw, I'm in the prime of my life.
Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives.
I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars.
You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars.
This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
We've got the vision, now let's have some fun.
Yeah, it's overwhelming, but what else can we do.
Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute.
Forget about our mothers and our friends
We're fated to pretend
To pretend
We're fated to pretend
To pretend
Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives.
I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars.
You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars.
This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
We've got the vision, now let's have some fun.
Yeah, it's overwhelming, but what else can we do.
Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute.
Forget about our mothers and our friends
We're fated to pretend
To pretend
We're fated to pretend
To pretend
New Album by the French Kicks
The French Kicks are one of those bands who haven't quite made an album's worth of enduring music. But aside from their middling second album, the French Kicks are demonstrating a promising trajectory. Maybe not quite an evolution in artistic development exactly but Swimming shows significant improvement over Trial of the Century in the consistency department. Give "Said So What" about 45 seconds, it blooms into a slightly repetitive but endearing sing-a-long. My guess is that "Love in Ruins" would be the single if this were a world in which Morrissey sold out arenas, it's a little fey and swoony. It's rare that I dig that kind of style, but Swimming has grabbed my attention.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
New Tune by Britt Daniels of Spoon -- Who Backs Your Money???
I'd like to claim that my serious blog credentials got me flown out to Portland, OR for MusicFest Northwest for the Britt Daniels show. I'd like to think Britt just had to have me there. Sadly, I wasn't there.The sound quality ain't great, but Britt's vocals are clear enough. Of note, Janet Weiss of Quasi, Sleater-Kinney and currently SM and the Jicks backed Daniels behind the drum kit and adds back-up vocals (maybe).
Truth be told, this ain't exactly mind-blowing shimm, but it makes me hopeful for a new Spoon album sometime in the near future.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Aimee Mann's eyes are freakishly far apart, but damn she is good
Seriously, you think those teeth are big--the space between those eyes in real life is huge. But seriously, Aimee Mann is like Ms. Los Angeles. Maybe I'm just saying that because Magnolia is like the Los Angeles-movie of the '90's, and the soundtrack, predominated by Aimee Mann, is just rock-solid. It might be my favorite soundtrack of that decade. But it turns out, Mann is a graduate of the Berklee College of Music located in my new home town, Boston. "Ballantines" is one of my favorites on her new album, F&$king Smilers, which is better than her previous The Forgotten Arm (which apparently one a Grammy for packaging, WTF???!!!). "Ballantines" is also a duet between Mann and Sean Hayes (who might be an actor or might just be someone no has heard of, or both), and it short and sweet. And it's got horns, which I always love.
Liam Finn -- Music moves my feet (too)
I've always found genetics fascinating (from afar anyways). Liam Finn is the son of Neil Finn, the lead singer, guitarist and songwriter in Crowded House (and the Split Enz with his bro, Tim Finn, before that). After Crowded House disbanded in the early-90's, Neil Finn kept plugging away and made some damn fine solo albums (Try Whistling This and One Nil). Getting back to the genetics theme, Liam's voice is a not-quite-carbon copy of his dad's--still the similarity is kind of amazing and rewarding for those who are fans of his dad. As an album, the results on I'll Be Lightning are mixed, but "Music moves my feet" demonstrates that Liam Finn is a promising songwriter worthy of the Finn surname.
Live Spoon from Pitchfork Music Festival 2008
Sometimes in order to find subject matter for theShimm, I shamelessly borrow other blog's posts. But at least I'm not afraid to admit it. Stereogum.com posted this relatively new live Spoon song, "Writing to you in reverse" I'm not quite bowled over by this song, yet anyways, but I got on the Spoon bandwagon about six years ago and I refuse to get off. This band rules!!!!
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Is this adorable or kind of gross?
I was all geared up to watch Sarah Palin introduce herself to the American people, and at some point in the speech, the camera turned to focus on that little girl licking her hand and smoothing down her baby brother's hair. Maybe that's fairly common in Alaska, but I can't help but be a lil' grossed out.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
The Walkmen's tribute to Louisiana
Here's to Hurricane Gustav for not destroying New Orleans. This might be my favorite song by the Walkmen (other than "The Rat"). It sounds like it was recorded with the Band down at Big Pink, rustic yet soulful.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Nick Lowe -- Classic Tune
I heard a snippet of this classic Nick Lowe tune, "I love the sound of breaking glass," and I felt inspired enough to post it. Lowe was also the producer of early stone-cold-classic Elvis Costello albums like My Aim is True, Armed Forces and This Year's Model. His solo work is spotty, but this is a great tune.
Monday, September 1, 2008
"Oops, did I forget to mention my daughter's 5-months preggo?"
"Pssst, the one on the right is a skank, and the guy in the middle is like totally wasted."
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