Introductory Miscellany

Hello all and welcome to my brand new blog. I have decided to finally cave in and go the Blogspot route, mostly because it is far more suited to presenting me with the sort of instant gratification that I am forever on the hunt for than trying to figure out how to get a blog onto my website would be. Historians and future biographers may want to note that I was reading fellow writer/performer and technical aficionado Pat Baer's blog when I finally surrendered to unspoken peer pressure. But that's all irrelevant and neither here nor there nor anywhere else in particular that I could find.

I write about music (www.amplifiermagazine.com) and comedy (www.ucbtheatre.com/ny), and this blog will be sort of an extension of all that. Hopefully. Otherwise, I'll maybe post to it twice and it will proceed to sink into the internet's vast muck of unused web pages. Most of that muck being, of course, sketch and improvisational comedy groups/shows that decided to create myspace pages for their two-month runs and went out and got 300 friends (said friends being not quite so much potential new audience members as fellow performers who probably really only accepted the befriending as a means to promote their own shows that the person(s) befriending them would've come to see anyway). The musings in this blog are strictly reflective of my own personal opinions, not those of the entities mentioned above, or of any pets I might've owned during the course of my life. In perpetuity.

When not writing about music and comedy, I work a ridiculous and mind-shredingly boring day job; another in an endless series of much-hated work that relates in no way to any of the things that I prefer to be doing with my life other than that every two weeks they deposit a certain amount of money into my bank account which allows me to purchase records.

So, this blog will probably, in some form or another, encompass all of those aspects. Others too, perhaps.

I just listened to the new brakesbrakesbrakes album The Beatific Visions (www.brakesbrakesbrakes.com), which I bought b/c I'm reviewing their show at Maxwell's in Hoboken in two weeks and I hate going to write about bands that I am completely unfamiliar with. I'd prefer to know the songs they're playing at least vaguely, so when they play them I can say, "Oh yeah that's that song" and then scribble some lyric or bit of the song in my notebook so when I get home I know what to look for if I need to reference it in the piece. I'm not sure where they're from but while I wait for their MySpace page to load I'm going to speculate that they are either from Scotland or they are Scotsmen from England. Oh, they're from Brighton, UK. Listening to it a second time through now, I'm kind of enjoying Eamon Hamilton's frantic, hyper vocals. However, lately I've been finding myself disappointed with bands who's records waver too much between two or more different tones. I felt that way about the Shapes and Sizes album that other reviewers seemed to enjoy, and my snap-judgement opinion about this record (should I be making snap judgements about records instead of letting them sink in more? Sure! Why not?!) is along the same lines. There's a lot of simple and engaging guitar rock jangle in these songs, but they move from blasting power-pop to alt-country to 60's Brit-rock in a way that sort of just makes me want them to stick to one of those things. That being said, tracks "Beatific Visions" and "On Your Side" are really good and lead me to believe that they are better when they hue closer to their country-and-blues-influenced-brit-pop influences. "Margarita" sounds like The Cars being fronted by John Lydon coming off Percocet. I mean that as a compliment.

A far more enjoyable album, one that grabbed me instantly and has yet to let go, is by a band named Pela and is called Anytown Graffiti. They are opening for brakesbrakesbrakes at Maxwell's, and I got their album first because it was cheaper and I didn't have as much money last week in the new music account I've partitioned off (which is not so much an account as it is me deciding I want to buy new music and making unresearched guestimates about how much money I have in my bank account and what I can afford to spend). The repetition of "Come sit next to me/'Cause I have become your enemy" in opening track "Waiting on the Stairs" should go on a lot longer than it does, but the fact that it doesn't just keeps me coming back to it. If you like Les Savy Fav (I'd prefer to think I live in a world where everyone likes Les Savy Fav), you will enjoy Pela. If you like Interpol and Modest Mouse, you will enjoy Pela. If you like babies and kittens and freedom, you will enjoy Pela. www.myspace.com/pela.

Wow, what a long initial post. The bar has been set, folks. Tell your friends that this blog exists so they can "tag" me and I will have to answer revealing questions about myself.

And yes, the title of this blog is a reference to a song by the band Chavez. They may very well be my favorite band ever.