Forever's Not So Long

I have two favorite Devotchka songs so far - maybe three now - and they played one - maybe two - Saturday night at the Fillmore in Philly. It was a good show...I don't really feel like my life has been enriched by the odd encore of scantily clad gymnast, but oh the string section, and the intricate piano work, and the sheer temerity of the sousaphone. And the mariachi trumpets. And his voice.

And these lyrics.

How It Ends

My other old original favorite is "Too Tired." And my new maybe but lemme think about it a little while favorite is "Transliterator."

The Opposite of Dank

Quite a tasty little wine, this odd combination of shiraz and viognier. It's a red wine that tastes fizzy without actually being fizzy...that makes your stomach sparkle...a mouthful of it is the opposite of dank. Which we can all use some of in New York this unsparkling, unfizzy, undelightful spring.

Check it out at this store.

The Bones Of You

Every so often, I hear a single song and I know that I have to be able to hear it again whenever I want for the rest of my life, and probably whatever other songs it has been packaged with on a CD as well, and that I must possess this capability immediately.

This happens less and less often as I grow more cautious about all the previous CDs bought on a similar impulse that turn out to be, well, junk. But it remains a happy impulse when I can't rationalize myself out of it, and so it was yesterday morning.

Now that we've got a decent radio station in NY at 91.5FM, my alarm clock tunes in at 7 a.m., just in time for the NPR round-up, after which I usually drag myself out of bed. But yesterday this song comes on after the news and glues me to my mattress until it decides that it has had enough of me, and ends. Partly because of the determined guitar strum that kicks in at beat one and carries all the way through, building at around 2:20 to a great contemplative noise before pausing and then striding forward again. Partly because of the lyrics, which are simply true, and were especially true for me yesterday morning, and start off something like:

So I'm there
Charging around with a juggernaut brow
Over draft speeches and deadlines to make
Cramming commitments like cats in a sack
Telephone burn and a purposeful gait
When out of a doorway the tentacles stretch of a song that I know
And the world moves in slo-mo
Straight to my head like the first cigarette of the day

And partly because of the ending - is that "Summertime" being played so faintly in the background? Curious...

"The Bones of You," this song is called (listen here), by Elbow, who I had previously lumped into the "another indie band that I don't have time for" category. No longer.

Addendum

As a postscript to my marching band post, I have just accidentally watched a video called "Talkin' Out Da Side Of Ya Neck" by a group called Dem Franchize Boyz, the Charming Olde Shoppes of the rap world. The video features a marching band and a repetitive brass line that could be played by a lone horn player who regrouped after proving unable to master, say, the C major scale in junior high band.

The song appears, fortunately, not to be about tracheotomies (tracheotomiez?), but instead to be about lying jerks.

Beh, I can't even bear to link to it.

Dirt Off Your Shoulder

I usually don't listen to music when I run. For a lot of reasons: my ears I guess are weirdly shaped because the buds fall out; and they sweat and that's just kind of nasty; but mostly because the beat of the music interferes with my running. I find myself trying to keep time with the music, and I just can't get any kind of groove.

But a couple nights ago, I'm at my local NYSC, curse its raggedy soul, at the tail end of a run on the treadmill, and this Jay-Z song comes on the usually garbage in-house video network, and damned if it didn't exactly match my tempo, and damned if I didn't run for an extra five minutes because it was so perfect.

Sigh.

Michael Beasley has disintegrated my desktop computer and probably all my music files therein (it's a long story). Now I must struggle with the unhappy decision of buying a new hard drive and taking the old one to a specialist to try and salvage my stuff, or just reloading the OS and starting over with a clean slate. The latter option is tempting considering my low tolerance for bureaucratic BS, but oh, the music I will lose...

A happier tale lies in the Hungry March band, New York City's off-kilter group of musicians of varying talent who play just because they want to. I ran across them - I think it was them - at the entrance to Prospect Park, pumping out a goofy version of something I recognized vaguely. "One, two, three, four!" they all shouted several times, over a rhythm that went "bam-a-lam-a-ding-dong."

I knew I knew that, so off I went to my computer. Typing in "bam-a-lam-a-ding-dong" turned up a variety of interesting things, including the news that this was a song by someone named Barry Mann, but I knew that wasn't what I knew, so I found myself on Wikipedia, where mass intelligence quickly led me to what I remembered that I knew I knew.

It's Le Tigre. It's Deceptacon. And it rocks.