Old guys still at it

Anybody heard Mitch Easter's or Jeff Murphy's new albums?



Post Edited (04-26-07 18:08)

i love the mitch easter album!

since i hate the shoes, i'll pass on murphy...

Aw shit - who can HATE the Shoes?

I had the exact same thought. I think it's fair to be lukewarm, or even uninterested in them, but that's an awfully innocuous target for HATE. It's like hating the Swinging Medallions.

> Aw shit - who can HATE the Shoes?


they're just so soft and likeable. and bland. makes me wanna kick something.

I concur about the Easter album. It picks up right where Let's Active left off.

I haven't heard the Murphy or any Shoes-related stuff since Stolen Wishes.

Did the Shoes ever tour?
That is one band I have never heard of anyone seeing live, and I used to live in Chicago for awhile.

yes, they toured. very little, but i saw them in new york once. late in the game. also, they recorded that live EP, so i suspect they played around the Zion area more than anywhere else

new bears album (eureka) has some nice moments...

probably helps with four guys sharing the songwriting. which makes the closing version of "coming round the mountain" all the more of a wtf headscratcher. would be out of place even if it was a good version.

not too fond of arduser's "troubled beauty" either. but i'm sure sum 182 could make a massive modern rock hit out of it without changing a gd thing.

Is Elvis Costello's new stuff any good?

Costello's recent stuff is like books by Tolstoy and Joyce - it's never taken off the shelf to be listened to, but you sure get to feel superior for having it there.

breno wrote:

> Costello's recent stuff is like books by Tolstoy and Joyce -
> it's never taken off the shelf to be listened to, but you sure
> get to feel superior for having it there.

That's bullshit. When I Was Cruel is as good as any album he's made since 1982. Damning with faint praise, perhaps, but that puts it in the same category as Blood & Chocolate, King of America and Brutal Youth (and far better, IMO, than his all-time top-seller Spike).

The Bacharach album is excellent; not a bad song on it. The Delivery Man hasn't grabbed me like those two albums but it's a good album and far too "country" to be compared to anything by Tolstoy or Joyce. If anything, it's albums like Spike and Mighty Like a Rose that deserve the Tolstoy/Joyce comparison. But those albums were a long time ago and he's been able to use the things he learned while making them in the service of another 15 years of good music since then.

It will never be 1979 again, and there will never be another This Year's Model or Armed Forces, but that's beside the point. Costello is one of the few artists from his generation who continues to bring intelligence and genuine creativity to everything he tries his hand at. He has hits and misses but even his misses are interesting and his hits are still very, very good.

All very good points, especially your last paragraph which I completely agree with. My comment was probably much more snarky and dismissive than it needed to be. Painted From Memory is unquestionably a fine album. I've never really been able to warm up to When I Was Cruel or The Delivery Man, but I know they have their passionate supporters.

But I was also lump things like North, Il Sogno and For the Stars in with recent work, all of which are more easily appreciated than actually enjoyed. I applaud Costello for recording them, but don't expect I'll ever listen to them again in my lifetime.

breno wrote:

> Costello's recent stuff is like books by Tolstoy and Joyce -
> it's never taken off the shelf to be listened to, but you sure
> get to feel superior for having it there.

That's bullshit. I listened to Joyce the the other day. If you never reread Finnegans Wake, how would you know how to babble in a made-up language in order to stave off the psycho ex-girlfriend? How would you know to thank all coherency in the world? If you never reread Ulysses, how would you know that any bad book you ever read is not a form of punishment? How you could you sneer at other readers for being obviously less literate than you? It's like not re-listening to Collective Soul then claiming membership amongst elites. True understanding of the universe can not be leached through Doestoevsky, my friend!

hey!

i read james joyce

tolstoy, however, holds up a couch's failing leg

I've never reread Ulysses, although I do listen to How Can You Be in Two Places at once by the Firesign Theater fairly often and get to hear Ralph Spoilsport lapse into Molly Bloom's Soliloquy at the end.

And I like Dostoevsky, although I do wish his characters would stop bursting into five page explanations of their philosophy of life at the drop of a hat. I enjoyed the heck out of The Idiot except when that dumbass Raskolnikov shows up and blows on for thirty pages or so without pausing to take a breath.

Update on EL Doctorow's The March: still haven't gone back to it after being interrupted, which could be taken as a critique, were it not for the fact that I actually was enjoying it before I lost the book for a few days. Read THE CHILDREN OF HURIN instead, and it's probably the closest to breezy that Tolkein ever got, although it gets hard to tell the difference between Nargothrond and Belleriand after a while. But at least that putz Tom Bombadil isn't in it.



Post Edited (04-29-07 22:27)

It's official: there will never, ever be another woman or young person associated with this board. Fer chrissakes, I've read all that too, but ixnay on the oycejay, olstoytay, and ostoevskyday. We're trying not to completely alienate ourselves from society here. Okay?

I thought The Devil Wears Prada was a fun movie. And what about that Jane Austen, huh? Can she write or what?

And hey - I made quite a lengthy reference to The Guiding Light in a post the other day, and it wasn't the Television song I was talking about!

Just doing my part...



Post Edited (04-29-07 23:30)

i am still a fan of turgenev - 'first love' is short enough to reread and goncharov's 'oblomov' mentaly resurfaces every month or so because of slothlike characteristic in my personality.

Thanks for the tip on the new CD by The Bears. That one slipped under my radar.

I love When I Was Cruel and Painted from Memory. I have to program The Delivery Man when I play it, though. The tracks with Lucinda Williams' vocals tend to work up the cat next door.

And scratchie is right: It'll never be 1979 again. But I can do without the acne and the curfew.

I still love the way Dostoevsky parodies Turgenev in "Demons"
Don't crush that dwarf, hand me the pliers.............

I was born on Bloomsday myself.

for ruskies

babel
pushkin
vlad the impaler nabokov


but turgenev is awfully good and notes from underground and the idiot made me SWEAT

re We're trying not to completely alienate ourselves from society here.

too late--we let reno in.

You can take your smart Russian writers, give me Joseph Conrad, Henryk Sienkiewicz & Jerzy Kosinski

I prefer Bill Sienkiewicz, especially when he was drawing Moon Knight.

HA! Not only have I referenced Russian literature, comedy albums and Tolkein in this thread, but now I throw in comic books, too. Too bad I know nothing at all about video games, then I could truly claim the title of Undisputed Saddest Bastard on Planet Earth.

Funny you mention the Sienkiewicz Moon Knight...I originally bought a bunch of back issues of that era in anticipation of the new Moon Knight comic that was to be penned by Charlie Huston, one of my current favorite novelists. But they weren't nearly as good as I remembered them being. The scripts struck me as being pretty hokey. The art was good, though.

It put me off buying the new comic, too.

There, I've mentioned comics AND crime fiction. And just to make sure I get my geek quotient up high enough, I'll throw in a gratuitous cult music reference: I listened to the reissues of the Triffids' Calenture and In the Pines this morning, loving them both.

I know jack about videogames as well, so I guess I'm not the USBoPE either. Damn.

Those Triffids reissues are great, especially those two since they end up being two sides of the same coin - a lot of the same material but given drastically different approaches. The Triffids were such a great band.

There's more to come. Apparently there is in place an 18-month project that will see everything the Triffids recorded - from their early C-90 tapes sold at gigs in their native Perth to their six studio albums and assorted unreleased material - remastered and reissued.

I either forgot or missed entirely the sad story of McComb's death (just saw it on Allmusic). Sounds like maybe heart complications after a car wreck? Any other local insights into it, Aitch?

He’d had a heart transplant in 1995 and it seems he was battling ill-health from that point on. He died in 1999 after what was apparently a minor car accident, was discharged from hospital and had a seizure that led to a fatal heart attack. He was 36. The various sources of local media seem to convey that he never really got over the transplant.
Steve Miller from the W Minc label said said McComb had “got into the habit of crashing his car of late as his vision started fading”.
He was in a band with Graham Lee called Co-Star at the time, I’m wondering if that is part of the re-issure project as well as the Blackeyed Susans stuff and the Love of Will album.
One of the nice guys.

I need to dig up the Blackeyed Susans disc. I remember listening to it and basically dismissing it since it wasn't the Triffids and never really gave it a chance. So I need to give it another listen.

If you're talking about All Souls Alive, I think you'll find it a delight. I haven't listened to Mouth to Mouth (the only other Susans record available in the U.S.) as much and I should give it another chance.

I'd love to hear the other Susans records, but the import prices are prohibitive.

Its always nice to revisit 1977, but one of the greatest things about TP is that it provides a continuum. A place to read and reminisce about the old days when you first heard "thats when I reach for my revolver" and then log on one day and find that Burma's still doing it. Hearing 2004's ON/OFF was like racing through time, not alone...but with friends. And I'm not talking about strict tempo here. Consequently, I get the same feeling with Chan Poling, Bryan Ferry and Paul Simonen. It's not how fast they say it, it's what they say that provides the sort of continuity that, like an old friend, should not be taken for granted.



Post Edited (05-04-07 19:48)