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2002: Best so far
2001: Best of
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Friday, November 30, 2001

World AIDS Day
That's today. An initiative to inform about AIDS on the internet via the weblog community.
There are two things about AIDS which I find noteworthy. Firstly it is a disease you can protect yourself against. That is probably one important reason why this bastard did not extinct mankind in the last twenty years. Nevertheless even though you can protect yourself many people do not do it. Especially poor people and particularly African people. And even if I would give these people the advice to use condoms the message would not come over as they do not have access to the internet. That is the dilemma. And I do not want to think about it any further as it makes me feel very bad as I am wealthy and AIDS is not part of my everyday life. Sorry about this totally inadequate contribution to World AIDS day. I'll try to post at least some links in the following 23.5 hours. Good night.

5 travels (I have made)
- Cycling from Salzburg to Athens in the heat of summer 1982
- My first hitch rom Moers to Firenze 1982
- Frisco / Sonoma / Big Sur in sunny early February 1997
- Sailing from Gomera to Hierro and getting into a storm on the way back in winter 1992
- Walking from Starnberg to Füssen in November 1989

Personal list of planned blog entries
- top 5 lists continued
- why camus is wrong
- on musical taste with referring to wine
- 50 albums of the 90s relistened, review before/after one per day

P.S. ILM: RIP George Harrison

Hot I Love Music threads (50+ new answers in the last week)
- Poptones Goes Bust: Your Views Please - Here's My Considered Analysis
- Waking Up To Us (B&S) [B&S = Belle & Sebastian]
- Jay-Z / Nas hip-hop throw down? & other throw-downs?
- Indiephilia!
- okay, this is it folks...the BEST of the BEST of 2001
- your cv as a music listener

Thursday, November 29, 2001

5 travels (I dream of)
- Crossing the Sahara with a salt caravan.
- Crossing the Pacific in a sailing boat.
- One month in a Zen monastery.
- One year in the Northwest Territories.
- Walking along the Appalachian Trail.

Why do you like indie so much?
Tom asked and Greenspun (the web host) almost exploded. Of course there was no final answer. All I can say is I like my indie.

Wednesday, November 28, 2001

5 songs
- Nick Drake: Road
- Joni Mitchell: Both Sides Now
- Neil Young: Cortez the Killer
- The Smiths: Girl Afraid
- Velvet Underground: Femme Fatale

P.S. Strange. All songs I chose I discovered before 1991 when my record buying craziness started. They all have in common that their lyrics touched me very deeply at a certain stage of my life. To choose a song from Joni Mitchell was extremely difficult. It could as well have been The Last Time I Saw Richard or Refuge of the Roads.

Tuesday, November 27, 2001

5 books
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Menschliches, Allzumenschliches
- Jack Kerouac: Big Sur
- Jack London: The Road
- Paul Auster: New York Trilogy
- Richard Brautigan: So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away?

That was hard. Concentration is not my strength. And not one book about love. How sad. Wait there is one I remember as I read it not so long ago. On Love by Alain DeBotton. Not in the general top 5 but definitely in the top 5 of books about love.
Btw I got the idea of the top five lists (this is only the start) from Douze Lunes's (a very fine French blog) second weblog JR files ("notes et anecdotes"). He got it from wherever you are who got it from Nick Hornsby I guess.

Quote of the day (stolen from The The's site)
Former heavyweight boxing champ Muhammad Ali visited the ruins of the World Trade Center on Thursday. When reporters asked how he felt about the suspects sharing his Islamic faith, Ali responded pleasantly, "How do you feel about Hitler sharing yours?"

And another
In Let's build a car, the relatively new joint weblog of Jess Harvell and David Raposa Jess writes an interesting post on old guitar avantgarde heroes like Henry Kaiser and Robert Fripp and on AR Kane, the forerunners of dreampop and shoegazer. I still have to think about an answer to the question which concludes the post: "So, is guitar experimentation dead as it seems?"

Monday, November 26, 2001

Just a link
I am wasting my time in not not contributing to the question "how do you define bad musical taste?" but arguing with Ned (All Music Guide reviewer) on a meta subject.

Saturday, November 24, 2001

Foreboding songs
I just discovered how scaringly anticipating the last songs performed by Nirvana and Joy Division were.
The last song on MTV Unplugged is a cover of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" by Leadbelly. Kurt Cobain screams at the end "I am going where the cold wind blows".
In Joy Division's "In a Lonely Place" Ian Curtis sings "Body that curls in and dies". The last stanza which Ian did not sing on the version on Heart and Soul but Barney Sumner did for New Order a year after Ian's suicide is on a suicide attempt(?).
Some more info, the complete lyrics of the two songs and the question on other songs announcing death in this ILM thread.

Laziness
Woody Allen in an interview with the German daily paper Frankfurter Rundschau on one of his main faults:
Q: Wie äußert sich denn Ihre Faulheit? (How does your laziness manifest itself?)
A: Zum Beispiel in der Tatsache, dass ich für meine Figuren immer möglichst kurze Namen wähle, damit ich nicht so viele Buchstaben in meine Schreibmaschine tippen muss. (For example in the fact that I always choose names for my characters which are as short as possible in order not to have to type too many characters letters into my typewriter.

Friday, November 23, 2001

I started a thread on ILM
What were the favourite bands/artists of your life up to now? I know it is difficult. I just did my list from when I was twelve years old to today. I am 38 now. The most difficult thing is to choose just one band/artist per year. I have succeeded. So should you. The list:

12: The Sweet
13: Manfred Mann's Earth Band
14-16: Genesis
17: Nick Drake
18-20: Keith Jarrett (jazz piano improvisations)
21: Dire Straits
22-23: Joni Mitchell
24: Neil Young
25: The Smiths
26: The Velvet Underground
27: Suzanne Vega
28: My Bloody Valentine
29: Sonic Youth
30: Red House Painters
31-32: Swell
33: Cowboy Junkies
34-36: Yo La Tengo
37-38: Giant Sand

Another current thread on ILM worthwhile checking out is ILM members in love on the music people were listening to when luv hit them.

Thursday, November 22, 2001

Idle talk
On ILM, the music discussion forum there is a thread Living in the shadows.. on underappreciated albums following milestone albums. Dr.C. and me have hijacked the thread and have been exchanging our world views of pop music. Dr.C. is one year older than me and knows much more about pop music than me and has a quite different taste.

After having placed my cd order two days ago I realised that I had forgotten the new Marc Ribot record Saints. Excellent instrumental impressionistic guitar work after what I have heard. I should have ordered that record instead of the Pinback. The mp3s I downloaded from the new Pinback were a big disappointment. Let's hope that the record is better.

Wednesday, November 21, 2001

Disappearance
Sous le Sable (Below the sand) is a film by the young French director François Ozon.
I love the French author cinema of Truffaut, Rohmer and Chabrol. Especially the first two have made films where conversation is essential. Ozon's film is different. Conversation is quite peripheral here. The film shows the slow psychical break-down of a woman who has lost her husband. She simply does not accept the reality and almost succeeds. I would call this an impressionist film which gives a very exact picture of what goes on in that woman. The more the story goes on the more reality takes over.

Spoiler alert! (though the plot is not so important really)
Jean and Marie are a middle-aged couple who go on holiday to the Landes south of Bordeaux where Jean owns a holiday cottage. They do not talk much but they seem to get on ok. The first time they go to the beach Jean asks Marie if she wants to go swimming with him. She says no and never sees her husband alive again. There are no huge waves. It is a normal sunny seaside day. The film is about how Marie copes with the loss of Jean. Even though it becomes more and more evident that he has committed suicide she won't accept that he is dead. She lives on as if Jean had only left for a short trip. When the police phones back a couple of months later that they have found a body who fits her description of Jean she does not call back. She does not want to know. She has an affair with an acquaintance who is interested in her only after having talked about it to Jean in her imagination before. When Jean's old mother who apparently never liked her tells her that Jean was bored in the marriage and probably just left her to start a new life with another woman she changes her mind. Now she wants to see his dead corpse. When she sees the deformed body in the morgue she denies reality again. She tells the police that it was not him though the belongings the police found were obviously his. At the end she is back at the beach and sees a man in the distance who resembles Jean a bit. She runs towards him and the film finishes.

Tuesday, November 20, 2001

Postponing
Sorry folks but the second movie review will have to wait till tonight.

In the meantime a list of the cds I just ordered via Glitterhouse (a fine small German label and mail-order):
- Beasts of Bourbon: Gone (DE)
- No-Man: Returning Jesus
- Friends of Dean Martinez: Wichita Lineman
- Dream Syndicate: Days of Wine and Roses
- Clean: Getaway
- Bob Dylan: Love and Theft (metascore 94/100)
- Martin Newell: The Greatest Living Englishman
- Leonard Cohen: Ten New Songs
- Howe Gelb: Lull
- Velvet Underground: The Quine Tapes
- Pinback: Blue Screen Live

Monday, November 19, 2001

What happened to men?
Recently I saw two movies about the absence of a man. In the first the man is mentally absent, in the second he just disappears physically. Both were highlights of this year's cinematographic output.

The Man Who Wasn't There is the latest work of the most European of all American film directors, the Coen Brothers. It is a film noir darker than any of the films in the 30s/40s which gave the name to this genre. Ed the chain-smoking barber does not talk much. When he speaks it is mainly about the miracle of growing hair and his fear that the hair could stop growing which would make him jobless. He lives an average American life in a small town. He is married and when he finds out that his wife betrays him everything takes its unstoppable course. I won't say much more about the story only that it does not finish as Hollywood films would end. Everything happens to Ed. He only reacts. The question of culpability is irrelevant. Ed could be a character out of Kafka's short stories. Especially Der Prozess (The trial) comes to mind. Or Camus L'Etranger (The stranger). Everything is fate. Ed is an anti-person. A loser whose care for the career of a young piano-playing girl is interpreted by her only as interest in sex (I actually thought the same). Who is so naive to invest money in an obviously fishy plot. Tragically it won't be only the cash that he loses there. The Coen brothers are in American film what Beck (esp. with Odelay) is in American rock music. Geniuses of eclecticism. They have absorbed all the history of Western arts and culture to create something refreshingly new. They transform Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which states that you cannot measure speed and location of an electron at the same time into the phrase "The closer you look the less you see" which the lawyer says in before the trial. There is also some very black humour at one point where I had to laugh till I cried when suddenly the laughter stuck in my throat. It is the scene when the brother of Ed's wife asks if there are no alarm clocks in prison as she does not turn up in time for her trial. There I really felt cheated by the Coens. I forgive them the slapstick scenes but in the trial scene they really manipulated the spectator. Anyways a great movie and one of their best together with Fargo.
It is a quarter to twelve and the other film review will have to wait until tomorrow...

Sunday, November 18, 2001

Why finish a book if you can start a new one?
I do not remember which was the latest book I finished. Was it Richard Brautigan's phantastic tragic story from a child's perspective So the Wind Won't Blow It all Away? back in spring? Was it Günter Ohnemus (German translator of Brautigan who writes in a similar vein as Brautigan) latest brilliant novel Der Tiger auf deiner Schulter (The tiger on your shoulder) also narrated by a teen? So light, rarely has a book made me smile so often during reading. By the way I really love books written from a non-adult angle. The profane world becomes a mysterious strange place full of surprises again. It rejuvenates me. Almost like having kids myself which is said to make you younger and less serious as well.

Back to the topic. In the past months I started at least four books of which I have not finished one yet. The first one was Klaus Kinski's autobiography Ich brauche Liebe (I need love). I liked it in the beginning. Kinski describes a poor and half-criminal youth and many physical encounters with the opposite sex. But suddenly I had enough. It was always the same story. Having sex with every second woman he met in any place imaginable. Too much showing off for my likes. Last Sunday we saw the Kinski exhibition in the Frankfurt Filmmuseum. And it turned out that his autobiography is fictional in places. He grew up in a middle-class family. Kinski's main strategies were imposture and provocation. You could see interviews with him on German television where Kinski only insulted the interviewer. Most films he played in were absolute rubbish like all these Italian Spaghetti Western in the 70s. Kinski would have sold his soul on the screen for a couple of dollars. At the exit there was a small video where Kinski was playing with a butterfly during the shooting of Cobra Verde (without Werner Herzog Kinski would have been nobody). His best role. I will never go on with his autobiography I think.

A couple of months ago I started Michel Houellebecq's new novel Plateforme which is still only available in French I suppose. The story of a guy traveling to Bangkok for sex. I read almost 50 pages and was amazed how easy the French was. Ok i must admit that I have some practice in colloquial French due to Catherine. But the book did not grip me. Usually I hate books and authors which are in, which everyone is reading. Therefore I did not read Les Particules élémentaires which was the French literary sensation in 1998. Somehow it is like with Kinski. Houellebecq is a little bit of a lady-killer. Like a rock star he has got many groupies who adore him and of course he takes profit of the situation. Who could blame him? Especially as he probably did not have a lot of sex in his youth. Look at his photos, he has the sex-appeal of a giant toad. His trick is provocation as well. He says that islam is a dumb religion and another 100,000 people buy his book. The themes of his books are contemporary: alienation, genetics and sex. Interesting and important subjects. So maybe I will continue his book soon.

The third book I started reading was the first volume of Bernard Ollivier's Longue Marche (Long hike). Ollivier is a retired French journalist who began a long walk following the historical silk road from Istanbul to Xian in China in 1999. The march is divided into four stages which he aims to accomplish in the summers from 1999-2002. The first two stages are finished. I do not know if he made the third stage. His destination was Turfan in Western China. And he did not plan to pass via Afghanistan. Walking is the best way to come to know landscapes and people. The most authentic way of traveling. It is not only extremely strenuous but also quite courageous to walk in the mid of Asia. You are at the mercy of the people you encounter. You do not look at the local population from behind a tourist bus window but you are in the middle of the action. You cannot escape. And therefore the locals do not receive you as a tourist who is usually just a cash cow for them. Hospitality is not only a word in the countries Ollivier traverses as we all know by now: just think of the Afghans who did not hand over their guest bin Laden. The book is nevertheless a bit tiring to read. The main themes are hurting feet, Turkish drivers wanting to give Ollivier a lift who always refuses and earns disbelief in return, people thinking that he is crazy to walk all the way, the difficulty and often impossibility of finding a hiking path when there is only a stinking motorway etc. I guess the idea of such a trip is probably more appealing than reading about it or even doing it. Nevertheless a very good read for the many long winter evenings to come.

The last book I started yesterday. Sorry folks but like all others it is not in English. The author is Eva-Maria Hagen, an East German actress who lived with Wolf Biermann (THEE German political songwriter who was expatriated from East Germany in 1976) for many years and is the mother of Nina Hagen who is known as THEE German punk girl back in the late 70s. The book is called Eva und der Wolf (Eva and the wolf) and is a collection of letters by Eva and Wolf. Those letters are very personal and Hagen is snotty and extremely tender at the same time. Somehow it really makes me wonder that these letters passed the censorship of the East German secret service the Stasi (Staatssicherheitsdienst) who must have monitored the correspondence. The letters which are from the period 1965-76 obviously also contain a lot of information about the political situation in East Germany. Biermann was something like the enemy of the state and Hagen was the national actress (resembling Romy Schneider a little) who met all the political elite including Honecker, Mielke, Mittag, Stoph, Ulbricht etc. She really fell between two stools and was expatriated in 1977 one year after Biermann. I saw her at this year's Osterspaziergang (easter promenade, a part of Goethe's Faust) in Frankfurt performing with Nina. They were singing "Hare Krishna, Hare Rama" and similar stuff. But it was quite funny and it was nice to see how well Eva and her enfant terrible get on.
I hope this is the book I will finish before starting a new one. Chances are quite good. Anyways the next book I start will be in English. I promise.

Circulus vitiosus
I am still fighting with nicotine. For the time being it is a lost battle but somehow I enjoy it. Last time I posted on this (three entries down) I had not yet started smoking before 12 o'clock. Today I started at 10 am. The first cigarette of the day really cuts the day in two. Up to the first cigarette I feel like a virgin. The world is an extremely slowly moving place before the first dose of nicotine hits my brain. The first cig is like a second wake-up. Before I feel like in a world of dreams. I am very relaxed and the time passes very slowly. The later I smoke my first cigarette the lesser I enjoy it and the more it makes my head spin. Almost every night after having smoked my last cig of the day I swear to myself that I will stop tomorrow. And the next morning I really hate the smell of the smoke in my room and my clothes. I usually change clothes completely as the stench of cold stale smoke really disgusts me in the morning. There are places where I do not smoke like my car or all rooms at home except two. The last bastions which have not fallen yet. My relation to smoking is really bizarre. I think I smoke only to stop smoking later on. When I have stopped smoking I do not really miss something. I enjoy stopping smoking. It is like a challenge. My sense of smell comes back slowly. I can suddenly smell the damp leaves in the road, the bouquet of a red Bordeaux wine, the smell of cigarettes other people smoke etc. But after a while I am bored. I restart smoking which is a challenge again as the first cigarettes (maybe even hundred) are so disappointing and disgusting. But then the floodgates open wide. And I am back to my 20 or more cigarettes by day. That is when it is about time to stop again. When will it end?

Wednesday, November 14, 2001

Listening to: Howe - Down Home.
Howe Gelb, frontman and mastermind of Giant Sand on his own. This cd only available from his excellent site features tracks which did not make it onto his last official release Confluence ('cept the piano solo album Lull which was released a couple of days ago). Laid back and relaxed it is desert (island) music again. Mainly guitar plus Gelb's appealing baritone with some piano/keyboard interludes. It starts very calm and stripped down and gets more jazzy and bluesy later on. The last song "Blue Marble Girl" features his charming little daughter babbling (she is on most of his last albums). Review in Comes with a Smile. Howe Gelb is definitely one of the most underestimated and unrecognized rock musicians around.

Check Michael Goldberg's Insiderone daily report (archive link) today on Velvet Underground's Quine Tapes with before unreleased live material from the late 60s. Another must purchase.

Saturday, November 10, 2001

Life on a String
In hindsight the title of Laurie Anderson's new album which was recorded before 911 sounds like a premonition of things to come. Mankind's life hangs by a thread now. At the same time "Life on a String" offers a way out of our current dilemma: music. Music is a means used in psychotherapy. Aggressiveness can be reduced by music in two ways. The patient can listen to soothing music like baroque or he can make music himself. Drumming for example can channel an abundance of energy.

Looking at the recent events unfortunately reveals that the two parties involved have replaced music by lethal unlistenable loud noise. Music is a way of communication. There is a perfomer and an audience. The audience listens to the performing artist.
The communication between the two parties fighting each other is however interrupted. The terrible noise of the collapsing WTC towers was not a sound anyone could have listened to. It killed the people who did not seal their ears. It disconnected the line of communication. The only possible answer to this could only be a counter-attack in deadly noise production. There was no target on the other side which would have generated a similar deafening noise if it would have been destroyed. Therefore the answer was clear. The response to the apocalyptic blast could only be a long-term noise inflicted to the aggressor or who is thought of as the aggressor. Bombing a country without targets does only produce much less impressive noises than the tumbling down of the WTC. In order to stay on par with the attackers the bombing has to go on for a long while so that the accumulated continuous tone of aircrafts dropping bombs can come closer to the original crash noise. It can never reach it though.
Just imagine George W. Bush, bin Laden, Tony Blair and the Taliban leader playing together in a band. It may sound naive but I think it would be a more promising way out of our current dilemma than killing each other with eyes and ears closed.

There are two lyric excerpts from Laurie's album which make me wonder if she is a reincarnation of Nostradamus (metafilter thread).

In the song Statue of Liberty she sings
"Freedom is a scary thing. Not many people really want it."
This line has become so frighteningly true by now that she changed it in her last concerts to:
"Freedom is a scary thing. So precious, so easy to lose."
Which is true as well but somehow less poignant and more general.

The second foreboding less known excerpt which really gives me the chills is from One Beautiful Evening:
"Oh beauty in all its forms.
Funny how hatred can also be a beautiful thing.
When it's as sharp as a knife.
As hard as a diamond.
Perfect."


Though "Funny" does not fit as adjective here. But I see the sharp knife / hard diamond (a metamorphosis of hatred) when the (first) airplane hit the WTC. And somehow the picture was beautiful and perfect in its incredible horror.

Wednesday, November 07, 2001

Smoking is a bad habit
Do you know this setting? Having smoked a cigarette and having put the cigarette butt in the ash tray. And the butt is still burning. And there are ten other butts in the ash tray which are dead. And you try to find the one which is burning. And you cannot find it. This can be a real nightmare if you are in the wrong mood. In that case I cover the ashtray to suffocate the butt. And it works. A fire cannot burn without consunming oxygene. Sometimes the knowledge of natural science can be useful. Thirteen years of bloody school were not completely useless.

Another smoker's experience I like to tell you. Infinitesimal smoking. You have finished your packet of cigarettes or your tobacco. It would be too much of a hassle to buy any more cigarettes. But you have got cigarette paper. What you do is you take the finished cigarette butts and squeeze them to collect the tobacco which is left. And you can roll another couple of cigarettes of it. When those cigarettes are finished some tobacco is left and you can roll another one...

I take a transatlantic flight. Smoking is prohibited on these flights. I arrive on an American airport. No smoking again. But there is a crowded room somewhere full of smoke. I cannot distinguish the faces of the people as there is too much smoke. I light the cigarette I have dreamt of for ten hours. And the taste of the cigarette is such a deception. My body needs the nicotine but the taste is so disgusting. I smoke another three cigarettes and the last one tastes ok again.

I had stopped smoking more than one year ago. But recently I have seriously restarted again. In the beginnimng I had one cigarette per month, then one per week, then two or three per week. Then it was one almost every night. Then I smoked every day but never before 6 pm. Then I started smoking in the office after 3 pm. Then after lunch. That is where I am now. I do not smoke before midday. But I smoke more than ten cigarettes per day. I am looking forward to my last cigarette again. Like in this New York movie by Wayne Wang co-written by Paul Auster. Who was it again who wanted to smoke his last cigarette? Jim Jarmush? Lou Reed was cool as I remember.

P.S. I WOULD REALLY APPRECIATE SOME MORE ANSWERS ON MY BEST SONG QUESTION TWO POSTS DOWN. I KNOW IT'S HARD BUT THAT'S LIFE!
P.P.S. Thank you Absintheur for mentioning my question in your blog. And thanks Phil and Starchild Starfinder for the answers. Don't you have a favourite song Absintheur?

ILM thread I have contributed to recently: When did music cease being furniture?
I love the title of that thread. And Dr.C. has got a very decent taste of music. But our tastes just do not overlap 100%. Gottseidank.

Sunday, November 04, 2001

Postscript to favourite song question
I have to be a little more precise concerning my last post. With favourite song I mean the song that has touched you most in your life. And by touched I mean that the lyrics have made a lasting impression on you. Could you also be so kind to include a small explanation of the song and its effect on you?

Some words on Nick Drake's "Road": The first time I listened to this song was in Spring 1980 and I was sixteen years old. I think it is the only song of which I know the lyrics by heart (I have got such a bad memory). And I did not learn it by heart but the lyrics were so strong that I could not forget them anymore after I had listened to them the first time. Nick Drake is singing about different ways of how to live your life. Of course he also sings about himself and the blues (as a state of mind) which has dominated his short life. I always wanted to "take a road that'll see me through" but I am not so sure now if I have succeeded. I did not "take the road to the stars" that is true and it is a road which has never interested me at all. The "road" is definitely my favourite metaphor in song lyrics. And roads have an end in themselves for me. Of course they lead from A to B. But the fascinating thing about them is the stretch in between. When you have left A and have not yet arrived at B. That is where I am at this moment.

A blog is an island
I have started writing a weblog a couple of months ago. It was very exciting in the beginning. Discovering that people were discovering that I wrote something on the internet available for everyone. Watching the number of visitors grow, hitting the 100 mark (visitors per day). Getting feedback from people (who had read my blog) via email or in the forum (though this is really a sad and inactive place, I do not know why but even regular readers of my blog still have not discovered the forum link below every post).
As you (as a regular reader) will have discovered by now this is just a meta post. I have nothing to say. Just one thing. I need more feedback to continue this exercise.
Please tell me your favourite song of all times. Deadline next Sunday, 11th November. Naturally all posts/mails will be published.
I tell you mine beforehand. It is Nick Drake's "Road" with the song line:

"You can say the sun is shining
If you really want to
I can see the moon
and it seems so clear
You can take the road
that takes you to the stars now
I can take a road
That'll see me through
"

Still listening to: Pinback: This Is Just a Pinback CD. (if you have never bought a cd purchase this record. I guarantee it won't be a wallflower in your collection). BLISS. Light years better than this Beach Boys release everyone has been talking about for more than thirty years called Pet Sounds which is one of the top ten overrated albums of all times. I just write this as someone from the techno/electronica generation referred to Pinback's music as being similar to the Beach Boys which it is obviously not.

Thursday, November 01, 2001

Top ten 1999
My inspiration hits ground zero today. Like Andy and Chris (guess which was my submission) have done recently I post a list today. Almost all my favourites of 1999 are calm, slow and melancholic. Serious stuff. Low profile. Why?
- Blur: 13. "When you see me, please, turn your back and walk away"
- Mogwai: Come on Die Young. no words which hit me
- Negresses Vertes: Trabendo. (FR) "Je cherche l'arbre sur lequel poussent les filles. C'est le plus beau des fruitiers il donne toute l'année."
- Pinback: This Is a Pinback CD. "Sad I'm gonna die. Hope it's gonna happen later than I think."
- Iggy Pop: Avenue B. "Above all I didn't want to take any more shit. Not from anybody."
- Radar Bros.: The Singing Hatchet. "Tar the roofs of the houses that are leaking"
- Smog: Knock Knock. "The type of memories that turn your bones to glass"
- Spain: She Haunts My Dreams. "It's all over now. He knew from the start. It was in the way she walked and the way she moved."
- Tocotronic: K.O.O.K. (DE) "Man wisse zwar nicht wann und wie es passiert und ob man gewinnt oder ob man verliert"
- Tue-Loup: La Belle Inutile. (FR) "Trop nombreux sont ces soirs où le néant s'impose"

- ILM threads on three new releases I am going to purchase soon: Laurie Anderson: Life on a String, Leonard Cohen: Ten New Songs and Bob Dylan: Love and Theft.
- Listening to: Pinback:This Is a Pinback CD. An album to cherish.

 

Copyright 2001, 2002 Alexander Fritz
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