Join The Calculator Cult

Last week I saw maybe the best Saturday Night Live sketch I have ever seen. John Malkovitch was the host, and there were a few Christmas themed skits as is the norm this time of year.

The point of this post is simple, watch the sketch so you get the joke when I say "We're getting a calculator!" I have been quoting this sketch with rediculous frequency lately. John Malkovitch and Fred Armisen are awesome, even (or espcially) when Malkovitch miffs the timing on the last "WHOOOAAAA!"

Merry Christmas. Hope you get a calculator.

Welcome Bryan and his Mix CD

First and foremost is an exciting announcement. My nearest and dearest friend Bryan will soon be joining Half Of A Wing as a contributor. I look forward to Bryan's views on music, movies, tv, fashion, pop culture, and anything else he wants to express.

I am a huge fan of the personalized mix tape/cd. They are like the perfect greeting card or thank you note or love letter. I have been making and receiving mixes from friends for as long as I can remember. Out of the ones I have received, some have been okay, some really good. Yesterday, Bryan gave me probably the best mix cd I have ever received complete with custom artwork and twenty one tracks of pure ecstasy (all except two I had never heard). I'd like to comment on a few of the highlights here.

Pants - Lemuria - Wow, what an incredible band, and a great song. Today is the first day I checked out this mix cd, but I can comfortably predict a longtime obsession with this band. A three-piece from Buffalo with those great female vocals that I love and great pop sensibility without being bubble-gum. Thumbs up.

Coin Operated Boy - Dresden Dolls - This is one of those bands where I've heard their name a million times but had no idea what they sounded like, and shame on me for that because they are great. Again, female vocals, but with a toungue-in-cheek delivery and lyrics similar to Folk Implosion's "Mechanical Man."

Here I Go - Syd Barrett - I have been a Pink Floyd fan since I was about nine years old. Though I have never touched a hallucinogenic drug I would argue that such is not necessary to appreciate the band's music. However, I only grew up with the Roger Waters/David Gilmour version of the band. I haven't heard a Syd Barrett song until now. Truth be told, I have been missing out.

I'd like to continue, but I am getting tired. I'll wrap it up with David Bowie, who enjoys two tracks on this mix, one of which is an awesome Pixies cover. I like things in threes, and David Bowie and Prince are two out of three in the trifecta of the most incredible musicians of all time who also broke into the mainstream. Who was the third? Shit, I can't remember. It was somebody good. Anyway...

A mix cd is like a gift. We can always ask eachother "hey, have you heard of xxxxxxx?" but the conversation may die at that moment. A mix cd (provided one makes the effort to put it into his/her cd player) ensures a true reccomendation will reach full fruition and I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most amazing forms of word-of-mouth procreation of musical culture that we have ever been part of.

The best song ever written...

...is Pulling Mussels (From The Shell) by Squeeze.

The song, released in 1980 on the band's third album Argybargy is to me the perfect pop-rock song. At four minutes one might think it clocks in a little lengthy, and perhaps that is why, amazingly, it never broke the top 100 singles charts.

Its starts full on, no slow build up, it just grabs you by the collar and pulls you in with no warning. It features a quality which I love in any song: the perfect balance of intensity and melody. As intense as the verse is, it builds even further on the pre-chorus and lets you down gently on the refrain, only to step on the gas again.

It also contains both a great guitar solo AND a great piano solo. I usually don't dig a piano solo in any song that isn't Madonna, but in Pulling Mussels it fits perfectly, and gives the song a nice jazzy feel right before "two fat ladies" make their appearance.

How are the lyrics? They are great too. It's mainly about random scenes on a beach and I'm pretty sure the narrator is telling us that he had sex with his girl "behind the chalet." I could be totally wrong about this, but theres so much going on in the story lyrically that even though it is totally literal, it could be open to interpretation, especially for me (see: "Party Lights").

Squeeze has had many bigger hits, and a lot of great songs, but Pulling Mussels (From the Shell) is the best song ever written.

The video below is somewhat interesting. The performance is at a considerably slower tempo than the album version.



While the clip above showcases the bands technical aptitude, it is even better displayed in this unembeddable video.

Carrie on My Wayward Son

It's always a good thing to give credit where credit is due.

Here are some mega high fives to Carrie Brownstein. We all know Carrie as the guitarist/singer in Sleater-Kinney, but I have found her to be as much an influence post-SK as while the band was making terrific albums.

Carrie's blog Monitor Mix is essentially the model for Half Of A Wing. I have tried my best to take the humorous yet informative, welcoming yet not too personal style of her blog as inspiration for mine. Even my ipod song reviews of the past are essentially a direct rip-off of her upcoming (hopefully) record review video vlog.


Thank you, Ms. Brownstein.

I used to be quite enamoured with her (I won't even get into "Locker 24"). While I still find her striking, I can look beyond that and really appreciate both in retrospect and real time the influence she has had on my creative output for so many years.

Also, let us not forget THUNDERANT

Grab Bag!

Is it laziness and lack of motivation or simply a lack of focus? I haven't posted in a while but I've had ideas floating in my head for some time. I'm going to tackle them all at once.

First order of business is a Guns N Roses update. I heard a song off of Chinese Democracy. I believe it was the title track. All I have to say is it sounds exactly like "The Everlasting Gaze" by The Smashing Pumpkins. Yes, we waited about fourteen years for a tired Pumpkins rip-off. I wasn't expecting much more than that anyway. Thanks Axl.

Revenge!

I wanted to write an entire post about revenge movies and how much I love them, but I don't mind relegating this topic to a few paragraphs. Last Friday I watched the film Hard Candy, featuring a pre-Juno Ellen Page. I wasn't expecting a revenge movie, but let me back up a bit. I consider a revenge movie to be one in which the main plot point or theme is revenge. This is not to be confused with a movie which has a "gotcha" ending like Michael Clayton. Such movies which fall into the revenge genre are Last House on The Left, I Spit on Your Grave, and the king of all revenge flicks, Kill Bill. In the case of Kill Bill there is pretty much no plot except a former assassin is seeking revenge on her former assassin friends for killing all the people in her wedding party and trying to kill her.

I guess it must be a vicarious thrill for me to see someone on the big screen carrying out revenge on those who did him/her wrong, but for whatever reason, I love these kinds of movies and Hard Candy certainly fulfilled this need for vengeance.

The synopsis of the film, courtesy of imdb.com is "A mature 14-year old girl meets a charming 32-year old photographer on the Internet. Suspecting that he is a pedophile, she goes to his home in an attempt to expose him." That and the promise of a masterful performance from Ellen Page was enough to get me to watch, but the movie delivered way more than promised. Yes, this movie could have been called "Ellen Page demo reel" but without spoiling anything, I'm going to give this film a high recommendation for tension which unfolds in unexpected ways, a revenge theme which unveils itself in a slow, satisfying style, and one of the most cringe-inducing "elective surgery" scenes ever committed to film.

Crystal Castles

If you're reading this, you are probably one of the three people who I know check out this blog (and I thank you guys, seriously). You also know how much I like Crystal Castles right now. I took the cd out of my car today, but I've taken it out before. This album is the only album in recent memory since Tegan and Sara's The Con that I just cannot, no matter how hard I try, stop listening to.


Get this album, asap.

They are, on first listen, just another electronic dance group. But after many, many listens I can testify that whether it is on purpose or not, they create soundscapes which bore their way into your brain like a bag of worms and fester there just long enough for the next track to change it up. Even their slow-tempo tracks are fascinating from start to finish. One of the things I love about them is that even though they have a main vocalist in Alice Glass, you cannot understand a word she says and I do not believe you are meant to. The vocals are more an instrument than a message for the song. For me, album of the year.

Football

Looking back at my baseball post, I see that is dated and irrelevant now, so I'll make this quick and disposable. I was telling a coworker today that I would actually be rooting for the Jets to beat the Titans on Sunday so that there would be no question that the Giants are the best team in the NFL. He posed an interesting argument: what if the Titans went 18-0 and met the Giants in the Super Bowl just as the Patriots did last year only for the Giants to beat them? Well, that would be totally awesome.

Love Will Tear Us Apart

On Tuesday I watched the film Control. It is a movie about Joy Division and their tragic lead singer Ian Curtis. I must say as I write these opening lines, I wish I was watching the movie again. I must admit I am not a Joy Division expert, I am a fan, and you may know my stance on thier peers in the style of late 70s early 80s synth goth. I will argue that The Cure and Echo and The Bunnymen while awesome, are really just darkly dressed pop bands, Joy Division truly delivered a bleak, barren sonic expression of life.

The film, thankfully, follows the cue of the band's music. It is both bleak and barren, but also beautiful. While it doesn't romanticise the rocker-suicide side of Ian Curtis, it sheds light on his personal demons. One feels sympathy for the man and his family without it being tugged out.

This film (directed by Anton Corbijn, the guy who made the "Heart-Shaped Box" video and pretty much every Depeche Mode video) is breathtakingly beautiful from start to finish and is a must see for anyone with even a casual appreciation of Joy Division.

Well, I'm going to wrap it up here. Thanks for reading.

November Rain

Don't ask me why, but I put November Rain by Guns N Roses on a mix cd that has been in my car for about the past three months. Its an mp3 cd, so there are about 150 songs on it. Ah, already I'm apologizing for this song, and that's the point of this post. It is just one of those songs, furthermore one of those bands, that you just can't really decide if you like, or if it is good.

Guns N Roses (GNR) were formed in 1985 and released their major label debut Appetite For Destruction in 1987. I was six years old in 1987, but I was pretty well aware of GNR at that time, even if most of their hateful lyrics went right over my head. I even wore this shirt a lot when I was in grade school.



Can you believe that? With all the guns shooting and knives and yes, a rose. I remember needles too, so either my memory is fuzzy or this is not the exact shirt. Either way, no fourth grader would make it in the door with this shirt on now.

Another funny GNR memory is when I was about that age I saw Axl Rose performing on television wearing an N.W.A. hat. I didn't know what N.W.A. stood for so I asked my dad. He obviously didn't think it appropriate to tell me the truth so he made up a slightly less offensive answer: "No Whites Allowed." Thats one of those things I can look back at now and laugh my ass off about, even though I didn't understand back then.

Of course by the time I got hooked on Nirvana et. al, GNR became the enemy. The Kurt/Axl feud aside, I remember a sound clip in the Nirvana film "Live, Tonight, Sold Out!" in which a music reporter quips that Nirvana are the Guns N Roses whom it is okay to like. I understand the comment, you can get all the aggression and rock and roll filth out of a Nirvana record that you can get out of a GNR record without the misogyny and homophobia in the lyrics. On the other hand, I think its okay to like anything, but thats kind of a different point.

Anyway its 2008 and every day for about a week, when the sports radio stations fade out as I'm about to come off the highway, I put on November Rain. At first it struck me as a really good song, then I thought it was really crappy. Now I can't decide, but I like it. The pros are that its a sweeping rock ballad with excellent guitar work from Slash. The cons are that the lyrics are stupid and Axl's voice just doesn't seem right for it.

So is November Rain a good song? Does it matter? Of course not. I just think GNR is a unique band for some reason.

One last point, the next GNR record, whatever it is called, is going to suck absolutely only for the reason of how long it has been in the works. Just think about it. It would be impossible to live up the anticipation (which has now all but dissipated), even if this album were as good as Appetite For Destruction. Everyone will say that it sucks, even if it is somewhat good. It is totally set up for failure.

Anyway just listen to November Rain and watch the awesome video.

The rhythm (based game) is gonna get you!

All I'm missing is "Samba De Amigo"
I love rhythm based music games. Maybe its the musician in me embracing the fake musician in me, but hitting buttons (or fake drums, or footpads, or guitar frets, depending on the game and peripheral) in time with my favorite (and not so favorite) songs will always be fun to me.

Rhythm based games like Dance Dance Revolution and Rock Band are the natural step-kids of Karaoke, the "fake it if you can't make it" singing culture that made its way from Japanese bars all the way around the world and back.

This post is basically a thank you note to my friend and real life band mate Jesse. Today he was nice enough to give me, out of the kindness of his heart, two brand new pairs of Donkey Kong Bongos and a copy of Donkey Konga.

Because of a friend's kind gesture, today is a special day for me. You see, until today I could not find a rhythm based game that my wife and I could play together. Up until today we have been somewhat of a music game odd couple: she with her DDR and me with my Guitar Hero. However within a few seconds of the first song we played together on Donkey Konga we were laughing, clapping and bongo-ing our way to music game marital bliss.

Thank you Nintendo, and thank you Jesse.