Devo - Workin' in a Coal Mine

Hey world. Did you know that Devo has songs other than "Whip It"? I'll bet you didn't. With the way you only play "Whip It" one would assume that you consider Devo a one-hit-wonder instead of the quirky genre-bending band with a message (the name Devo is an abbreviation for de-evolution. Devo was founded on the idea that humans are becoming dumber, less evolved, and more ape-like as time goes on. This philosophy would explain the kids from Jersey Shore perfectly) that they are. Devo has several good albums and waaaay more songs of note than "Whip It." Also, you need to know that the Pet Shop Boys catalog is deeper than "West End Girls" and a-ha's discography extends waaay beyond "Take on Me."

That said, "Working in a Coal Mine" is a merely decent Devo song. It's obviously a cover of the classic Allen Toussaint tune. Devo was always a bit weird in selecting their covers. They also covered "Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones. For a band as strangely skewed as Devo I suppose any song would seem an odd choice for a cover. At any rate, Devo cranks out a workmanlike cover of "Working in a Coal Mine" on this single. There is no b-side, it's the same song on both sides of the record.

Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence b/w Mephisto

This is another 50 cent bin rescue, and I think I really got away with one here. This is clearly a jukebox record because it included the pink jukebox name tag and came in a white sleeve (the retail version came in a blueish/purpleish sleeve with the rose from Violator). There is a similar record selling for about $100 on ebay right now, which means I basically stole this record.

"Enjoy the Silence" is one of the best songs from the very best album Depeche Mode ever made (seriously, if you prefer any DM album to Violator you're just wrong. Deal with it). The version on the record is the single mix, which means it doesn't include the ambient noise found on the album version. The b-side "Mephisto" is a spooky little instrumental track. It's not particularly special. It sounds like it could be in a video game soundtrack (something along the lines of The 7th Guest. Remember that game? My friends raved about it). All in all this is a good single which is worth a lot more than I paid for it. I do find it a little odd that this single came out in 1990. That seems a bit late to be releasing vinyl jukebox singles.

Phantom Planet - The Happy Ending b/w Clockwork

Phantom Planet is a band whose best work was behind them way before they released their critically acclaimed album The Guest that included the overplayed eventual theme from The O.C. "California." In case you were wondering (and you weren't) Phantom Planet's best album is Phantom Planet is Missing. Despite the fact that Phantom Planet has failed to reach their formerly glory or former number of famous actors behind the drums, later Phantom Planet releases are still quite enjoyable.

The a-side of this single could just as easily be from The Guest. It's right on par with everything the band has done since "Local Black and Red" cast its inescapable shadow. If you're wondering why I speak so slightingly of Phantom Planet's later music, it's at least partially due to a conversation I had with Alex Greenwald (lead singer, snob) in which he trashed the band's first album because I asked him why they never play songs from it anymore.  Maybe he was having a bad day and I was in a mood to blow things out of proportion but the fact remains: Phantom Planet Is Missing is the best album Phantom Planet is capable of. It also features the most famous drummer they will ever have. This single is ok.

Weezer - Hash Pipe b/w I Do

Weezer has always been an important part of my life. I consider them to be the greatest band in the history of music for reasons that both include and transcend their music. I can't offer an unbiased estimation of anything they have ever done.

Disclaimer aside this is a great single. "Hash Pipe" is a classic Weezer track and is backed by the solemnly sweet "I Do." I can't listen to either of these songs and not be transported back to a magical summer where I had tons of fun, no obligations, brushes with love, parties with friends, and an awesome soundtrack for it all. "Hash Pipe" is a part of that era and as such will always be great in my eyes.

Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs - The Pillowcase EP

Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs are a great team. She has one of the best three female voices of the 80's (The others are Aimee Mann and Belinda Carlisle) and is befuddlingly attractive. Matthew Sweet is a power-pop deity and is much fatter than you would expect him to be. They apparently share a common love of semi-obscure songs from the 60's.

The Pillowcase EP is a double 7" vinyl collection of a-sides and b-sides from the Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs collaboration Under the Covers. Each of the songs is covered ably by Sweet and Hoffs, but I can't say that I prefer them to the originals. More than anything this EP introduced me to The Left Banke, which is a big deal. As vanity projects go, this is a good one and thoroughly enjoyable. Just don't be surprised if this EP or the album from which it is derived inspire you to go listen to the original versions.

The Police - Every Breath You Take b/w Murder By Numbers

Is there anything I really need to tell you about "Every Breath You Take"? It's the song about stalking that's so good it made men think stalking was a normal thing to do and made women think it was a desirable perk of being attractive. Later on VH1 would have 20 different people tell the same joke about how creepy the lyrics are. Ultimately nobody cares. It's still a great song.

The b-side "Murder By Numbers" is standard Police fare. The only interesting thing about it is that it appears to be promoting murder. Is this 45 really just Sting's Plan A and Plan B for an ex-girlfriend? "First I'll stalk her and if that doesn't work out I'll kill her." If "Murder By Numbers" teaches us anything it's that murder is super easy. I wish fewer people in this world were aware of that.

Modest Mouse - Float On b/w I've Got it All (Most)

Sometimes a song can be so good that I feel the need to keep it from myself until it blows over. Having learned my lesson from "One Headlight" by The Wallflowers, I fled from any situation in which "Float On" played. I kept the radio off (a good suggestion regardless of intent), I stayed out of bowling alleys, I didn't play this single, and took many other extreme steps to keep myself from hearing it too often. I knew "Float On" was a hit and I didn't want to gorge myself on it and be unable to enjoy it later. I took the same tactic with "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley and "No One Knows" by Queens of the Stone Age. Now all the payolas pumped into those songs have played out and I can listen to them at my leisure. Take that Clear Channel!

Anyway, "Float On" is a great song that sounds like nothing in the Modest Mouse catalog before it. I know the Modest Mouse catalog because when I was in college I spent a decent amount of time looking for music that was borderline unlistenable because I wanted to be cool. Modest Mouse isn't unlistenable, but it was unlikeable as far as my roommates were concerned. It's just a great pop song with a driving beat and lyrics that might as well be rama-lama-ding-dong for how much I care about what they mean.

The b-side to "Float On" is more of the Modest Mouse I know. It's quirky, offbeat, full of stops and starts, and ultimately doesn't go anywhere. I prefer the a-side, but the b-side makes me feel smarter. Maybe that's why so much of college rock is angular and hard to enjoy. You feel smarter if you can enjoy music that openly defies you.

The Beta Band - Out-Side

I, like every other non-liar, first heard about The Beta Band while watching High Fidelity. Shortly thereafter I became the sort of guy who collects vinyl. I might try to tell you that I owned records prior to seeing High Fidelity. This is both true and misleading. I grew up with vinyl, but I willingly sacrificed it the same way I gave up tapes for CD's and Atari for Nintendo. I picked all these things back up when it became cool to do such things, but I stuck with it because I genuinely like it. It can't be for the coolness factor because now I'm an overweight guy in my 30's who reads comic books. I can do nothing to achieve coolness. Once you reach the point where you can't do something ironically (like wear a fanny pack or have a mullet, for example) you have simply lost the ability to be cool. Frankly it's astoundingly liberating to not have to worry about being cool.

Anyway, The Beta Band is always hard to pin down. This 45 actually has the same song on both sides, but you wouldn't know it to hear it. The b-side is a remix, but it isn't the "same song with a bass beat" type of remix. I just happened to be in the mood to hear a little Beta Band today, so this was soothing to the ear. The sky is grey and the weather is cold and The Beta Band is the perfect soundtrack.

The Dentists - Hear No Evil

I used to pick through piles of 45's and pick up the ones with interesting covers. This masterpiece was in a milk crate under the vinyl rack at Zia's. It was tucked away in a pile of old jukebox rejects and scratched pieces of garbage. I picked it up because it had a brown cardboard embossed cover and looked somewhat rare.

Here's the story on this record as I understand it. After years of making somewhat mediocre brit/jangle pop The Dentists made deals with three separate small time record labels. Each produced a 7" single entitled either see, speak, or hear no evil. Even though it was conceived as a set, each record was produced independently. They all have different covers (this is the best of the three) and are all currently out of print and hard to find. I got this one because Independent Projects, which is stationed in Arizona, pressed this thing.

Each of the three records starts with a poem about hearing, seeing, or speaking no evil. The flipside song on this 45, "Charms and the Girl" is about on par with other Dentists material. It's not bad but it doesn't stick with you. The other track is "Leave Me Alive" and it is the greatest jangle-pop song I have ever heard. I am not kidding and I am not overstating the greatness of this song. I have listened to it at least 100 different times and I still can't shake it. I can't even describe what makes it so great (partly because it's enigmatic and partly because I'm not a good writer). Just trust me that this song is perfect. It cannot be improved upon or apparently duplicated by the very band who made it (yeah, harsh. I know. For some reason I can't stop slamming The Dentists even though they made this fantastic 45).

Cheap Trick - The Flame b/w Through the Night

I have always been a fan of the iconic slow jam that is "The Flame." It's the very reason I picked this 45 (oh, I'm going through my records too, by the way) out of a 50 cent bin. With that out of the way I think you should know that up until today I had never heard the b-side to this single.

"Through the Night" is the flipside of this 7-incher and it is a good enough song to make you say, "Sheesh, if this isn't good enough for the album how great is the album?" Turns out Lap of Luxury is a pretty good album though not so good that it would not have benefited from the addition of "Through the Night." As a matter of fact, the two albums preceding Lap of Luxury would have been better with a gem like this (I'm looking at you, The Doctor).

"Through the Night" is a pretty simple song lyrically, and the tune is straightforward. It's just that the song jangles and pops and just when you think Robin Zander's voice couldn't go higher, it does. Also, it has the greatest bridge of any Cheap Trick song that I can conjure into my memory as I write these words. The song is just a solid 8 out of 10, which means it's too good to be a b-side in an era when Cheap Trick had some slip-ups (I'm looking at you, The Doctor). This is a great single and can be had for as little as 50 cents. There's no reason not to own it.

That Which Stinks

So I have the great fortune of having a wife who not only willingly watches Star Trek with me, she enjoys it. Every night we watch one episode of a TV show together on our Apple TV. She was the one who chose to watch Star Trek: The Original Series (she also chose to watch Next Generation a year ago or so). Here's the great thing about watching Star Trek with my wife: we both enjoy cheesy sci-fi, but we also un-ironically love the Star Trek universe. When the Gorn threw its unbelievably slow punch in "Arena," my wife and I both laughed out loud and played it back three times. When Spock's brain was stolen, my Wife and I were legitimately concerned because despite everything we were still able to suspend our disbelief. I love it because we can watch the show with both a critical eye and  a childlike wonder.

Our love of the Trek being what it is, my wife and I couldn't help but be completely offended and bothered by  the episode we watched last night: "That Which Survives." It was without question the worst episode of the series thus far, and I can't imagine a worse episode with so few left in the series.

Here's the problem with "That Which Survives": the dialogue for Spock awful. It is a well-established fact that Spock is not a fan of the emotional nature of humans, but he is not openly antagonistic about this point. He merely treats it as his cross to bear since he was the one who chose Starfleet over the Vulcan Science Academy. For example: in "The Galileo Seven" Spock is in command of a shuttlecraft crew whose members are being killed by large and somewhat comical cave men (the weapons in this episode are hilarious, especially the non-threatening giant spears). When members of the shuttlecraft crew suggest that Spock is being unfeeling in not allowing proper burials for dead crew members, opting for the more logical course of securing a means of escape, the crew nearly mutinies. Spock responds only by outlining the logic of his course of action and does not condescend to his crew or seem unable to comprehend their feelings. The Spock of "The Galileo Seven" is a Spock we know, understand, and can predict.

In "That Which Survives" Spock is constantly berating the Enterprise crew for their human thoughts and feelings. He suddenly seems unable to comprehend metaphor and exaggeration (a problem he never had before). It seemed like Spock basically turned into Sheldon Cooper. Every time Spock opened his mouth, my Wife and I groaned. It was as if the person who wrote the episode (John Meredyth Lucas, who also wrote "Patterns of Force," the Nazi episode that was strangely awesome) had never seen an episode of Star Trek. In fact, if you gave the basic plot to a person who had never seen a single episode of Star Trek and had no idea what a Vulcan was, they would have written better dialogue. A room full of monkeys with typewriters would have churned out a better script.

Because Spock is my wife's favorite character (what can I say? The lady has taste) the entire episode felt like a betrayal of everything that came before it. The sad thing is that this episode actually had potential. The plot wasn't too bad, but the dialogue killed it. "That Which Survives?" More like "That Which Stinks."

Things to Buy With Bookman's Credit

So my in-laws gave me a great gift for Christmas: Bookman's credit. If you're like me you're a 32 year old man who looks nothing like his profile picture and has too much time on his hands. You also know the joys of Bookman's, which is the greatest used item repository in Arizona. Most of the store's physical space is devoted to used books (which is less and less appealing to me since my acquisition of iPad technology) but there are also musical instrument, electronic, and video game departments. Bookman's is one of my happy places.

So the wife, kid, and I packed up and headed to Tucson (not my favorite place on Earth) to go blow my Bookman's credit. I ended up picking up a CD player which looked fantastic and turned out to be a total dud (The right channel is dead. Thanks Memorex for doing such a bang-up job making it and to Bookman's for selling it to me in such condition), a second turntable for the computer room, and three NES games.

This is the CD player I purchased. The main reason I'm so upset that it doesn't work is because it's a beautiful piece of machinery that fits perfectly on my shelf. I just wanted this thing to work so badly (I'm tired of listening to my CD's with my discman and headphones. It makes me too isolated) that it was doubly upsetting when it didn't.

This is the turntable I picked up: the Ion Profile Pro. It's a USB turntable (a disappointing development if you ask me. So many turntables now are being marketed as a means for transferring your vinyl to digital formats. I could understand it if they were being marketed as a way of making your vinyl collection portable, but they always seem to be advertised as a way to be able to throw your vinyl collection out once it has been digitized. The only thing I can think of is that there has to be a whole generation of people who wish their father's Pat Boone records were MP3's.) but it also has an internal phono preamp which makes it much more versatile than my old Pioneer turntable. The Pioneer is a better turntable in general. It has a better needle cartridge, better tone arm (you can't adjust the balance or anti-skate on the Ion), better use of wood paneling (the Ion sadly has none. It's as if it wasn't made in the 70's at all), and better overall sound. On the plus side, I can plug the Ion into anything that can take USB or RCA connectors, and it doesn't have to be grounded like the Pioneer (older turntables have a ground wire as well as RCA plugs. Usually the ground plugs into the back of the receiver or amp, but my Pioneer doesn't ground properly unless it's wired to the screw of the outlet cover the turntable is plugged into. So not only can't I plug my Pioneer in just any old where, it needs an amp with a phono preamp and an outlet that is nowhere near the floorboards. Luckily I have such a setup here, but I might as well bolt my Pioneer to the shelf because it literally can't go anywhere else).

The Ion looks super sleek, which is nice. It also allows me to play records in rooms other than the one my vinyl collection is in. I keep my records under lock and key because my soon-to-be two-year-old daughter has already taken an interest in my records but has no idea how to treat them properly (I don't know what the age of consent is for a record collection. I want her to have great taste in music but I don't want her to ruin records like I did when I was a kid. She already sat on a fairly rare Scott Walker platter once, which prompted the locking doors on the collection). For the past 8 months I have only been able to listen to my records if my daughter isn't around, but she's always around. With the Ion I have a little more freedom, which is nice. So far it's been like inheriting my own record collection. Anyway, I'm talking too much about this thing and I'm sure I sound like a typical vinyl-centric hipster. I hope I'm not that guy. I've actively tried to take steps to not become that guy. For example: my actual prescription glasses are horn-rimmed (I got them in Cambodia. They were the only decent frames in the store) but I never wear them and choose to squint rather than even look that horn-rimmed hipster vinyl guy that nobody likes. Also, that hipster guy is a blogger so I'm on thin ice. I am not writing this from a coffee shop if it helps.

This is the first of three NES games I bought. I don't really care for Q*Bert on the NES. I own it for both of my Atari systems and without looking I might even own it for the Intellivision. It's a little too simplistic for a Nintendo game, but there's a good reason why I bought it. A reason I will reveal soon.

From all accounts this is not a good NES game. I looked at screenshots and was not impressed, yet there's a good reason why I spent Christmas credit on such an item.

Zanac seems like a good enough game, but that's not why I bought it. All three of my Nintendo purchases fill one purpose and one only: I needed a "Q" "X" and "Z." With these three games I now own an NES game for every letter of the alphabet. It's odd that I didn't own a game for any of these letters considering that prior to buying these games I owned 153 NES games. I'm not particularly excited about any of these games, but my collection feels more complete. This was an OCD purchase more than anything.



Anyway, that's what I did with my Bookman's credit. The CD player will be going back (it's a 2 hour drive back to Tucson. I miss living in Mesa) as soon as I can manage and I'll have another $30 to blow on Bookman's purchases. So look forward to another blow by blow of a nerdy shopping spree. I know you can't wait.

Different Blog, Same Unremarkable Content

I used to have two blogs that I tried to keep simultaneously. One was a boring and unremarkable blog about music and the other was a boring and unremarkable blog about nerd stuff (mainly Nintendo reviews). It became a huge burden to support these two blogs. The main problem is that I have no idea how to write reviews and make them seem at all legitimate or interesting. I don't have an incisive mind for music, I just know what I like. I don't know how to write anything that will justify the rankings I give the games I review. I just don't believe I have the prowess.

Consider this blog a debt consolidation. Instead of working with two blogs I'm underequipped to run, now I just have the one. So that's pretty good. Oh, and you can look forward to more defeatist ramblings like this one as time goes on. It's something I do.

Flake Music - When You Land Here, It's Time to Return

Do you like The Shins? I know I do. Are their three studio albums not nearly enough of their unique indie sound? I know it's not enough for me. That's why I own this Flake Music album.

Before they came to be known as The Shins, they were know as Flake Music and they were part of a lively Albuquerque indie scene that spawned Scared of Chaka, The Rondelles, and several others that I am too lazy to look up. Anyway, this album sounds basically just like The Shins, but without the high production values of Chutes Too Narrow. There are only 8 tracks listed on the back cover, but there are 11 tracks on the disc itself. There are 3 untitled interstitials on the album, which are placed fairly randomly. It's the sort of thing that drives me nuts because I like to know the titles of the tracks I'm listening to.

As for the music itself, just imagine what The Shins would sound like if they were a little less produced and a little rougher around the edges. Even so, if I played this for you and didn't tell you it was Flake Music you would definitely think that it was an earlier incarnation of The Shins that performed under a different name.

Five Iron Frenzy - Quantity is Job 1 EP

This EP was my introduction to the fantastic Ska/Punk of Five Iron Frenzy. Five Iron Frenzy are as versatile as you could ever want a Ska/Punk band to be. They can rock hard, they can roll sweetly, they can cover ELO and make it sound completely natural, they can dish out high quality comedy, and they can dabble in absurdity. Add to that versatility the vocal talents of Reese Roper, and it's a savory combo.

I highly recommend "My Evil Plan to Save the World" "Dandelions" "Sweet Talkin' Woman" (Yes, they cover The Electric Light Orchestra and knock it out of the park) "The Untimely Death of Brad" and every single ridiculous track of the pants opera. So that's over half the EP. I can say without hesitation that if Ska/Punk is your bag, you will dig this EP big time.