Last night (Thursday) I saw Bat for Lashes live. It was a really good concert!

You may have heard about Bat for Lashes from their awesome, creepy music video from 2007.

I got the album (Fur and Gold) after hearing that song and was mostly disappointed. The other songs just didn’t seem to have the depth and feel as that song. So then recently this year I heard Daniel on Last.fm.

Very cool song! Especially when you realize what it’s about!

Wes: Khan said in an interview with The Sun newspaper that Daniel was based on a fictional character that she fell in love with as a teenager.

she fell in love with daniel-san?

The Karate Kid! So then I got that album (Two Suns). It was better than the first one, but I still wasn’t feeling it.

Well, last night I convinced myself to see the show because the band makes such good music videos that the show could theoretically be really great. Well fortunately I was right, objectively speaking!

The whole band was spot on with sound. The main thing that I noticed was that the synth was weirder and the drums and bass were louder, giving them that sound I’d always hoped and dreamed for. I have a theory that when the band records, the label (presumably) turns up the sound on the singer’s voice, makes the synth mostly chill, and relegates the D&B to the background so that the music will be more palatable to the masses. I haven’t done any research at all on this, but I can say that their performance was great live, and their albums are mostly mediocre (to me).

My only complaint was that the concert was at The Loft, which is part of The Palladium. The Palladium has bad sound, is in a sketch part of town, and is just bad in general. Here are some examples comparing The Palladium to The Granada (my favorite venue of all time.)

1. The Granada, while small, has multiple floor levels, so you never get stuck behind tall people. The Palladium is flat.
2. The Granada has a bar, but it’s well partitioned from the concert area, so the annoying loud drunk people don’t spoil the show. The Palladium, not so much.
3. The Granada has a dedicated photographer who will email (and post on flickr) any pictures he takes of the show. With the Palladium that’s not the case, so when you are trying to watch the show you see annoying people taking pictures instead of watching the show.

Overall though, I’d give the concert 4 stars; and it would be 5 if it weren’t at The Palladium.

I saw CKY this past Friday and it was a most excellent concert.

I saw two of their three openers. The first one was vanilla boring metal. Only worth mentioning for completion.

The second band was Graveyard. They were very interesting. I think they are classified as Blues Metal. It sounds ridiculous, but the music was alright! They were reminiscent of a Metal version of the Allman Brothers. Certainly worth checking out.

Then cKy, the headliner, started playing. They were great performers. They didn’t have any kind of setlist and almost entirely played requests, which was pretty cool.

One thing that was interesting about them is that they refuse to allow silence in their concerts, so if they aren’t playing, the audience needs to be cheering. When silence did occur they would play really cheesy eighties music as punishment. That was pretty hilarious. They even came out to Billy Jean, which was pretty awesome.

There was one point at which they asked for songs to play and after a few minutes of people calling out songs, the guitarist said they could only play half of the requests. So they started playing one of the songs and at some point in the song the guitarist said, “Wait wait wait! I said half!” so then they switched songs. They did this a few songs and ended the medley with Michael Jackson’s Beat It. That was pretty excellent.

The last thing worth mentioning was that the parents Margera were there and April Margera came up to sing along with the last song. That was pretty cool.

Anyway, if you are local and want to come to a concert (J-Dot) here is a link to my concert calendar.

Sorry I’ve neglected the Album of the Week. It’s really hard to write about music. I think I am going to make my requirements for AOTW postage less strict.

So with that in mind, this weeks Album of the Week is the eponymous Ladyhawke
. It’s a very 80′s sounding album by the interesting artist Ladyhawke. According to Wikipedia Ladyhawke has a weird seagull disease, Asbergers syndrome, and is allergic to medicine?

I love the songs Paris is Burning, and Dusk ‘Til Dawn. If you can get ahold of the international version of Paris is Burning where she sings english for most of the song and French for the chorus that is most excellent. I haven’t been able to find it though.

Colors: Black and Hot Pink.

I recently got a new car stereo due to the other one being stolen. I am almost entirely happy with the model that I ended up purchasing, but one thing that it does, which is really obnoxious, is that it doesn’t sort the files correctly unless the track number is early on in the file name. Even if all tracks are “FooBarBaz 01 – name.mp3″ it seems to ignore the number unless it’s the very beginning of the file name. Anyway, easy fix:

It doesn’t really deal with illegal characters, it just doesn’t rename those files. Eventually I’ll get around to doing that. Anyway, just figured someone might be interested/want to copy paste this.

Saturday night my roommate and another friend went to see Astronautalis. He was actually sandwiched between Valina and The Paper Chase. Valina was a generic rock band that I can’t imagine ever going to see just for them. They just didn’t seem to bring anything special to the table. The Paper Chase were Dissonant Rock and most of their songs sounded the same. We left after their fourth song I think.

But Astronautalis’ show was awesome. I’ve never been to a rap concert per se, so some of the things that I note are probably typical, but on the other hand, Astronautalis’ music isn’t like most rap (evidenced by the fact that I like it.) He first came on stage and greeted us all. He has a little routine he does around the songs, which isn’t that unusual, except for the fact that his routines turn into freestyle rap sometimes, which was pretty cool. He gave us advice that to survive in these tough economic times we should steal from people, or more specifically, family and friends, because unlike strangers, family and friends won’t ask questions. It was pretty hilarious. So then he went on to do various recorded songs, most of them from Pomegranate.

Basically he would play the track from his laptop and rap/sing the song. He had a ton of energy while he was performing. He looked like he was gonna get an aneurysm and moved his hands around a lot to symbolize the lyrics. It was awesome.

About halfway through the show he did a freestyle (and asked the audience for topics) and nailed it. I was surprised that his lyrical style (very much like that of Collin Melloy’s: almost mythical, with a moral to the story) came through loud and clear despite the fact that he was making up the lyrics on the spot. Again, this may be typical of rap music, but I was still surprised.

It was a really cheap show too, $14 at the door, so that was awesome. When we left The Paper Chase we went to talk to Astronautalis where he was selling merch. He seemed like a cool guy and we all got to shake his hand and buy a couple of his albums. Next time he is in Dallas I am definitely going to see him again. It was a great show.

I have had quite the love affair with prog-rock. One of the bands that led to this affair was The Flower Kings. I think the third album of theirs that I got was Space Revolver
. Space Revolver is very much prog and very much Flower Kings. For instance, the first song, I Am The Sun (part one) has lots of noise and even a weird (but awesome) sub-song that most bands certainly wouldn’t do.

It has a lot of the gorgeous guitar thanks to Roine Stolt head man as well as a lot of really amazing “soundscapes”, or very instrument driven sections of songs. I think that the soundscapes come from Tomas Bodin, who has had a few solo albums himself.

The album also has some of the standard FloKi’s Doom and Gloom in Monster Within. To expound upon that, despite their standard message of love (see band name,) they also have this interesting feeling of judgment in their lyrics. Here’s an example:

So you say that you cannot sleep, you’re not into counting sheep
All the monsters are for real, something out there, the way you feel
Grown up man, you’re still losing sleep, aliens hiding in the deep
Nights of terror and gates of hell, can’t get rid of that brimstone smell

They have a lot of other really great albums, but you have to start somewhere right Anyway, hopefully you will enjoy this album as much as I do.

Favorites: I Am The Sun (part one), Monster Within.

Colors: Red, Blue, Green.

I’ve decided that seeing a concert warrants a blog post, and that a concert blog post can fill in for an Album of the Week post. If I pay the money to see a concert (typically more than the cost of a CD) I probably like the band that much With that in mind I present to you my most recent concert: The Flight of the Conchords.

You’ve probably already heard of Flight of the Conchords. It was the biggest single concert I’ve ever been to by far. (The Flaming Lips was actually a festival so that doesn’t count.) According to the band there were somewhere between four thousand and six thousand people there. Wow. Most concerts I go to have somewhere between one hundred and five hundred people. FLOTC is a comedy band that has a show on HBO. Typically I prefer to see their live stuff on Youtube though, so a concert seemed perfect.

The tickets weren’t very expensive. Thirty five + ticketsuckster fee totaled to something like forty seven dollars. We actually arrived a little late so we hardly saw any of the opener, so I won’t comment on him at all. The transition from the opener to band was instant, which is excellent. The band came out in robot costumes and performed “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor.” They changed into normal clothes while the lights were off and after that it was basically songs and between song chit-chat. The music was great and the talking between was also very good.

My only major complaint was the audience. I go to plenty of concerts, probably at least one, if not two, per month. The people at this concert just did not know how to behave! First off, it seemed that a large portion of the crowd felt obliged to get up and get a beer every 15-20 minutes, so of course we are standing up to let them pass or the people in front of us are or even the people behind us are knocking our heads with their largely shaped behinds as they squeeze out to the aisle to get one more carb packed alcoholic beverage. And then of course there was the people that had to yell to their bro five seats down that they really liked the current song. At first I thought I was just being uptight, but my two compatriots agreed that it was extremely obnoxious.

Anyway, I give the concert a four out of five rating. Everything was great except for the use of a certain ticket provider and certain audience members.

This week’s Album of the Week is Anywhere I Lay My Head by Scarlett Johansson. The album is comprised of Tom Waits covers done by Johansson. According to my friend Neil and also Internet, Dave Sitek, also made quite the impression on the album as a whole.

The main impression one gets from the album is it’s muddled sound. It’s as if Johansson is singing from the bottom of a lake or something. That has a lot to do with all of the effects on the songs. I think it gives the album an interesting feel. I have one friend that when he listens to it he can’t get through a song because he just wants to listen to Tom Waits originals.

I think this album is good for listening to when you are feeling introspective and the Nuckelavee are after you. If you need some solace from the outside world let Scarlett envelop you with her voice while Tom Waits sings through her.

Favorites: I Don’t Want To Grow Up, I Wish I Was In New Orleans, Fannin’ Street, Falling Down, Anywhere I Lay My Head.

Colors: Black, Blue, Brown.

Furr by Blitzen Trapper is the Album of the Week. This post (as well as 2-3 others) should have been done earlier in the week, but I was a little swamped. Sorry if you were on the edge of your seat

So Furr has definitely been my favorite album this week. I can tell because Last.fm tells me I have listened to it ELEVEN TIMES in the past 7 days. I would describe the style as somewhere between Neko Case (indie country) and Bob Dylan. I have also seen the band compared to Neil Young as well.

Their style is also slightly erratic, with songs like Fire & Fast Bullets, which brings OK Go to mind, and then Gold For Bread which is more like older rock, but with weird noises in the song at some parts. Very intriguing music.

Factoid: both Furr and God & Suicide have been on the NBC show Chuck. You may not like that show, but it definitely has lots of indie music (whatever that means.)

I dig the lyrics. The first song that caught my ear, Furr, is about the transformation from man to wolf to man. And then we have Black River Killer:

Then I went to the river for to take a swim
You know that black river water is as black as sin
And I washed myself clean as a newborn babe
And then I picked up a rock for to sharpen my blade

Favorite songs: Furr, God & Suicide, Black River Killer, Fire & Fast Bullets, Saturday Nite, Gold For Bread.

Colors: Tan and Brown.

Brave by Marillion is this weeks Album of the Week. Before I get into specifics I need to tell a story about how I got into Marillion…

I found out I loved prog music because of Transatlantic. Marillion’s Pete Trewavas is one of the members of Transatlantic. I checked out all of the other band member’s groups, but I never did check out Marillion (as in order a CD.) One day I was in the thrift store and I happened upon a Marillion album (Season’s End.) It was surprisingly good and I bought up a few more albums (Misplaced Childhood, Fugazi, and some other one I can’t find.) Anyway, I just cannot believe that I found music that excellent at a thrift store.

Back to Brave. Brave is one of the earlier Marillion albums, yet it still falls into the “Hogarth” era Marillion. I would compare Marillion with Radiohead, except I don’t really like Radiohead enough to know them that well. Marillion often has fairly dark music, and Brave is no exception. I have never actually noticed the lyrics on Brave (except for The Great Escape,) but Brave is a concept album. I recommend reading the lyrics instead of listening to me about that though.

I would also describe this album as very heartfelt; that is, I would say that feeling and meaning tend to bleed through. I would compare this to how I feel about The Arcade Fire.

Brave is one of those albums that you really should listen to in its entirety. It has a great intro and an excellent finale. Brave is a good album to listen to when it’s pouring rain out and you just feel like brooding.

Favorites: Bridge, Living with the Big Lie, Hard as Love, Brave, The Great Escape.

Colors: Black, Navy.