Java Hair

Animals In The Dark

If you haven’t heard William Elliott Whitmore before, you really ought to give his new album, Animals in the Dark, a listen to.  He’s an old soul in a not-so-old body with a voice that makes him sound decades older than he is.  He’s been compared to Tom Waits many a time.  His style has been described as Folk, Country, Alt-Country, Punk, and Soul.  He definitely sings with a lot of soul, has a punk attitude, and musically sounds a lot like folk, playing a lone acoustic guitar or banjo.

I just started listening to him recently, but he has been around for a while.  I haven’t had the chance to see him live yet, but hopefully sometime after he gets back from his tour in Europe I’ll be able to catch him somewhere.

Animals in the Dark is a politically charged album which is pretty self evident on tracks like “Mutiny”, “Old Devils” and “Johnny Law”.  If that isn’t your thing, don’t let that deter you, there really is some great music on this album.  If you like this one, be sure to check out “Songs of the Blackbird”, I’m not sure if I like it more than “Animals”, but it certainly has grown on me since I snagged it from the iTunes store.  That purchase, btw, marks my first purchase of music from the iTunes store, now that it isn’t DRM’d and I can use play it anywhere, I no longer have a good reason to not buy my music there.  I still am a little annoyed by the lack of mp3 support, but being able to purchase and download directly on my iPhone really seems to make up for that.

As Whitmore syas, “I don’t want to be set, I just want to be free.”

More about William Elliott Whitmore:

The Official Site

MySpace

Before I start posting heavily with the hard-core design and development content again, I wanted to lighten it up a little with another music-based post.  I haven’t actually posted anything about music since November of last year, and even that was about a book about a musician.

Sentimental Education

So let me indulge myself a little and write about one of the more interesting bands that I’ve come across in my life.  I’m sure most of you out there have at least heard of Sonic Youth, that fountain of post-punk, experimental, sometimes rock music that exists even now, lead by Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon.  Well, Thurston Moore does some solo stuff, and Kim Gordon does a bunch of side projects, one of which is a few albums released by a band called Free Kitten.

Free Kitten was formed by Kim Gordon and Julie Cafritz around 1992, the current line-up also includes Yoshimi P-We of The Boredoms.  Free Kitten released Unboxed in 1994, it’s good if you like them, but it isn’t their best.  If you want to listen to something interesting that you haven’t heard before and that you are sure to never hear on the radio, check out Sentimental Education which was released in 1997,  Never Gonna Sleep would be my recommended single off that album, it is #2 on my list of most listened to tracks in iTunes.

They recently (in 2007, actually) released a new album, Inherit, after a 10 year hiatus and that album turned out to be pretty good too.  One of my prized possessions is an autographed copy of that cd case (pictured here).

So what do they sound like?  Well, they sound like a lot of noise, but not as much noise as some of the Thurston Moore releases, most of their songs at least have a good beat and some interesting guitar work.  Almost all feature Kim Gordon on vocals.  Basically, if you like Sonic Youth, but you think it’s too accessible, you’ll love Free Kitten.

It’s almost Thanksgiving and I haven’t posted anything about music in while so here’s one that’s been sitting as a draft for some time now.  I hope you find it interesting.

Don Felder - Heaven and Hell

If you are an Eagles fan, you probably know this already, for those of you that are not familiar with him, Don Felder was one of the driving forces behind the Eagles great success. He and Joe Walsh really were largely responsible for transforming the Eagles from a country band to a rock band in the mid to late seventies.

I been an Eagles fan ever since l spent hours upon hours listening to Eagles Live over my buddy’s house. I was ten or eleven years old and his brother had a decent collection of 70’s rock including Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Eagles. One of our favorites was Eagles Live, a great album even now. Back then I had no idea who Felder was and even as I grew older I was mostly aware of Henley and Frey as being the driving force behind the Eagles.

Felder’s recently published book, Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles 1974-2001, describes in detail his childhood and especially his involvement in the Eagles. I always suspecting Henley of being a bit of a ass, but after reading that book and hearing him interviewed on Howard Stern’s radio show a couple weeks ago, I realize that both Henley and Frey were complete ego-maniacs, control-freaks, and just plain greedy.  Now I know this is coming from Felder himself and I’m sure everyone has their own side of the story, but Felder really comes across as honest overall, if a little bitter.

One of the more interesting aspects of the book is the many Rock icons that Felder either grew up with or worked with before joing The Eagles.  For instance, he actually taught Tom Petty to play guitar early in his life.

If you are a fan of the Eagles or a fan of rock music in the 70’s, i recommend you take a look at this book, it’s really surprisingly well written and quite interesting. It is a little depressing, however, in that it really sounds like being a member of the band during their heyday wasn’t nearly as much fun as it should have been.

You can check it out at Google Book Search.

As you know if you pay any attention to my music posts, I am a pretty big fan of punk rock. I’m not even ashamed to admit that I indulge myself in the genre sometimes known as pop-punk. One of the bands that originally turned me on to poop-punk was The Lemonheads. I had been listening to punk rock for a while, bands like The Clash, Sex Pistols, Ramones, etc, and I liked it, but there was something about The Lemonheads that I really enjoyed.

Now I know there were other pop-punk bands out there at the time, but the Lemonads with Evan Dando were one of the first bands that I listened to where the music was definitely punk rock, but it was catchy (so far the Ramones), and the lead singer sometimes actually sang the lyrics (Sorry, Joey).

I’m not talking about their later mostly pop albums, I am mostly referring to “Hate Your Friends”, “Creator”, and even “Lick.” The album “Lick”, by the way, contains a great cover of Lukas by Susanne Vega.

At this period in their history, vocal duties were shared by Evan Dando and Ben Deilly. Both of them actually do a good job with the band, but I prefer Evan. If you are as old as I am you might even remember Evan Dando was once on the cover of People magazine.

If you are looking for some decent late 80’s or early 90’s pop-punk, check these guys out. They might be more “punk” than “pop”, especially back then, but they are certainly worth a listen.

Do you think I could open my talk on ADF 11g by playing their cover of “Amazing Grace”?

I’ve been lax with the music posts lately, too many presentations to prepare and technical stuff to get done, so I thought I’d take the time to post something today and liven up the blog a littel bit. All this talk about Forms, ADF, and Java can get a little dry sometimes.

Alkaline Trio has been around for a while now, and in my opinion they haven’t exactly been getting better. They are a 3 member (big surprise, there, heh?) punkish rock band with some definite goth tendencies which have been emphasized a lot more in later albums which have also become a little more mainstream.

My favorite Alkaline Trio album is “Maybe I’ll Catch Fire.” It has a lot of catchy tunes that are somewhat dark and comic in nature. The song “F* You, Aurora” about a town in Illinois named Aurora in which there was a bad car accident that took the life of one of the band members friend’s. It includes the lyric s “…And although it’s all my fault, The blaming myself had to come to an end. So I say:F*** you Aurora, you took my only friend. You won’t catch me behind the wheel, Of a Chrysler ever again.” Matt Skiba has a flair for good lyrics.

My other favorite song on the album is simple entitled “Radio”. It is one of the best I-hate-you and wish-you-would-die type of songs out there. With lyrics including “I wish you, would take your radio to bathe with you, plugged in and ready to fall,” and “while you’re taking your time with apologies, I’m making plans for revenge,” it gets my vote for one of the best sing-along songs ever. Not that I’m bitter or anything, but everyone has a bad day every once in a while and just needs to get it out somehow, don’t you think?

Other albums I would recommend by the Trio include “From Here to Infirmary” and “Goddammit”. “From Here to Infirmary” is definitely more pop-punkish than the other two, it has some better production values, and was their first album to get any real airplay. It is still pretty funny in that dark humor kind of way and so definitely worth a listen to.

That’s all I got for today, and the funny thing is, I’m in a good mood, not bitter at all, go figure.

Time for another music review/tirade/lesson. As you will eventually guess if you stick around this blog long enough, I have somewhat diverse taste in music. I listen to everything from Hip-hop to Punk Rock to Alternative Country to Electronica and anything in-between.

About a year ago I learned of a guy who records under the nom de plume of Girl Talk. He is really a DJ and Mash-Up artist and not so much a singer/songwriter or a musician but in some cases he makes some great music just the same.

Though his latest album is a masterpiece, some of his earlier stuff is pretty bad. “Secret Diary” from 2002 is difficult for me to listen to. If you want to hear something really awful or feel like punishing your cube-mates, blast some of that, really it doesn’t matter which song.

With “Secret Diary” and on into “Unstoppable” you can see the seeds of what eventually became “Nightripper” which he released in 2006. With “Nightripper”, Greg Gillis aka Girl Talk combined all of those great samples he must have catologued in that head of his into something musical. With the first album, he had some great samples but wasn’t really sure how to put them together musically and instead strung them together with lots of noise, a lot of times sounding like someone was turning a radio dial, and sometimes sounding like someone running their nails across a chalkboard. Like I said earlier, this one can be painful to take.

On the other hand, if you want to listen to an example of what Mash-Up artistry really is take a listen to “Night Ripper”. This album combines riffs and samples from a huge variety of songs, from Elton John and Cyndi Lauper to 2 Live Crew and Eminem, into one cohesive collection of actual musical noise. In my opinion it is really a work of genius that can only be fully explained by listening to it. In this album he takes all those great samples and instead of putting them together with random noise, incorporates them into actual songs. I’m pretty sure I said that he wasn’t a musician, but anyone who can write songs like this has got to be classified as a musician, don’t you think?

So, since many may have found my last post to be pretty drab, all about ADF and all, I decided I’d spice up this blog by every now and then letting you all in on what music I’m listening to. If I get crazy enough, maybe I’ll even take the time to post a last.fm widget up here so you can get the latest info on what I’m listening to (come on, you know you want to).

My musical tastes are fairly varied, in the last hour while I’ve been sitting here, I’ve been listening to Jay-Z (his first, Reasonable Doubt), Kittie (their latest), and Feist (The Reminder). All good stuff, but I really have a soft spot for female-lead punk rock, and the more they don’t fight the poppiness of punk the better.

That being said, the album I’ve probably spent the most time listening to over the last month, the cd that has been in my car since I got it, is the latest album by The Dollyrots, Because I’m Awesome. I like it because it is pretty much pop-punk the way it should be, a lot of tongue-in-cheek in both the lyrics and the music. I was a pretty big fan of The Donnas years back, but as they’ve gotten older, and especially on their newest releasse, they just seem to take themselves too seriously. The Dollyrots, on the other hand, still do not, not with lyrics like “I don’t need you cause I’m neato and I beat you, ’cause I’m awsome.”

So if you are in the mood for some good ole pop-punk check out the Dollyrots, they won’t disappoint.