Nearly a week ago I saw Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers perform at The Fairfield Theatre (in Fairfield, CT). However, I’ve been a little “under the weather” and still haven’t got around to posting my pictures and videos from the show. Honestly, I’m disappointed with myself.

I’ve also decided that I listen to a lot of music throughout the day. I start when I leave for the train in the morning, and it continues till I get back to my apartment in the evening. There’s the occasional lull here and there due to a phone call, lunch, meeting, in-between-albums, etc. But on average, that’s quite a full day of listening to music.

(Since everyone that reads this must be super interested) Today, I started with two Killers albums: Hot Fuss followed by Sam’s Town. I then decided to make an On-The-Go playlist so that I won’t have to keep selecting a new album once one finishes. So next up was the latest Foo Fighters, Echos, Silcence, Patience & Grace followed immediately by Army of Anyone’s self titled release. Next was Blackfield II which is currently playing the final track “End of the World”. Still to come (I’m adding to this list as I go along) is Joel Plaskett Emergency’s Ashtray Rock, Porcupine Tree Nil Recurring, and last (so far) Buckcherry’s self titled. And on that note, I’ve just added Radiohead In Rainbows.

My good friend and roommate, Pete, wins the Personhood Award for the month of October. I accumulated zero personpoints, whereas he pulled into the lead by meeting, and having a conversation, with Bill Bryson at a book signing Tuesday evening in addition to grabbing Shawn Smith’s sweaty, meaty man-hand at the Brad concert earlier this month. This morning, I passed Matthew Broderick on my walk into work this morning (not meeting him and thus gaining no personpoints). So congratulations to Pete.

Since I usually don’t enjoy losing, I would like to point out that for the month of June, I won the Personhood Award for my Vegas trip to see Matthew Good.

Someone, somewhere, had a great month of July. And the same for August. September also.

Well, from the looks of things recently, this blog has turned into a concert review blog. In keeping with that theme, I attended the Tragically Hip show Tuesday evening at the Grand Ballroom at the Manhattan Center. I will keep this rather brief since I am quite tired at the moment (I may revise this post sometime tomorrow).

I am pleased to say that the concert was another positive experience. The opening act, Joel Plaskett Emergency, was completely reminiscent of my recent trip to Vancouver. The girls we stayed with had his latest CD in their car and, among other things, was played frequently. The songs were great, and were similar enough to Tragically Hip’s music to be appreciated by the crowd. Both acts are Canadian, just throwing that out there.

6:30 pm doors seems early to me. The Hip (as they are sometimes called) went on at around 9:15 and were onto their encore by 10:40ish (a long set for the main act — the way things should be). I would like to add here that I went to the show with my Mom. My Dad is a big Hip fan and the two of us were supposed to go. Unfortunately, he is out of town for a week on business and was unable to make it. My Mom bravely went in his place. She apparently enjoyed the show, and my extra set of earplugs helped tremendously.

Gordon Downie was his usual crazy self (when he wasn’t “tied down” to strumming an acoustic guitar). I was able to get a full video of the song “Courage” which I have embedded with this post. Lots of microphone stand flipings, various towel throwings, pretending to be shot and falling downings, charging at the audience as if the microphone stand is a spearings, etc, etc. My favorite (a/k/a “favourite”) bit was when he acted like he was stabbed in the chest with his microphone. He handed the microphone cable to an audience member who tugged and tugged until the cable came loose. Gord made a face like “Great… but the microphone is still stuck in my chest”. He went on to another person who pulled out the mic. The best part was that he tossed him the microphone after!

Anyway, I feel that this is enough of a “review”. I’ll write a personal post later. Cause, that’s what I do. Ok. Goodnight?

Maybe there is no actual place called hell. Maybe hell is just having to listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses when they’re eating sandwiches — Jim Carrey

AMAZING BUT TRUE There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it would completely cover the Sahara Desert

Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don’t add up — James Magary

Ok, first off, spam-comments on this website have changed from complete gibberish to random quotes. Weird. These are a few of them.

Completely unrelated to the above, Thursday night I saw Mute Math perform at Irving Plaza. *Ahem*, sorry. “The Fillmore at Irving Plaza”. I managed to fill up my entire 2 GB memory card with photos and short clips of songs and moved onto my 32 MB card which only held an additional 8 pictures (all to be uploaded Monday). I didn’t even fill up the 2 gig when I went to Vegas. Or Vancouver for that matter.

Onto the shows content.

I believe the first words out of my mouth after the show ended were “Fucking Awesome”. The two opening bands (I know, I’m jumping around) were Eldar, a fusion-jazz trio, and Eisley, a band that I’ve found is pretty good in small doses. Eldar had a strange setup. They had the drums and upright bass on the stage, with the piano down on the floor to the right of the stage. Irving is standing room only, so it was impossible to see their pianist (I just wanted to write that word out, always funny). But, I should elaborate on “standing room only”. The doors opened at 8:00 with a line running all the way around the block. The place was packed when the first opener went on stage.

Eisley, the second opening act, was tiring. The band has 2 CDs out. Their latest, Combinations, was released just over two months ago. Three girls, singing and playing guitar, with swelling, high-pitched, ‘peak-and-valley’ vocal lines just isn’t exactly my cup of tea. The melody for the vocals would rise and fall in pitch in exactly the same manner for every song. In addition, whoever was singing would also move back and forth from the microphone to create the “swelling” effect (volume-wise). I’m not quite sure how that is conveyed to a reader, and I would not recommend getting their CD to simply hear how annoying that could get. Anyway, enough.

Strolling onto the stage at nearly 11:00 was the main act. Mute Math began with the first two tracks off their CD, “Collapse” and “Typical”. Its now Saturday, so I don’t remember the set list verbatim, but they only have one album and I’m pretty sure they played all of it. Plus they did a new song. The highlights were the crazy antics that went on stage. Paul Meany, vocals and keyboards, whipped out what looked like a home-made keytar with a touch sensitive strip on the neck. Based on where you put your hand down, the output was various strange sound effects. Moments after playing with it for a bit, he literally gave it out to the audience, neck first. The crowd devoured it, and anybody that touched it was contributing to the sound on stage.

The last song before the encore was incredible. Paul and Roy Mitchell-Cárdenas (bass guitar) each grabbed a piece of Darren King’s drum kit and contributed to the percussion section while Darren picked up the kick drum and placed it into the outstretched hands of the audience. Everyone held it up in the air while Darren crouched on top and crowd surfed for a moment while banging on the kick drum below him. I, unfortunately, was out of memory for my camera at that time.

And that’s actually all I have to say about the show. Though, I would like to comment that I was very impressed with the house mix at Irving Plaza. Every instrument (vocals included) were clear and audible. The entire mix was far too loud for my taste, but that’s what I bring ear plugs for.

Now, its off to go buy a pumpkin.

I am a firm believer that live performances of music is a big part of the larger “music” experience. Not entirely a necessity or requirement to appreciate an artist’s talents, but more of a supplement to an already established enjoyment. Or a concert environment could, having not heard an artist at all prior, create the foundation that could either blossom into a liking or disliking of a particular act. I can cite two particular examples of concerts I have attended having heard nothing by the artist before the show.

Last night I saw the band Brad perform at the Highline Ballroom. Brad, last night anyway, consists of Shawn Smith (from Pigeonhed and Satchel and looks like Kevin Smith - the director), Stone Gossard (from Pearl Jam), Kevin Wood (from Devilhead), and Mike Berg. The songs were musically simple (nothing wrong with that) paired with Shawn’s unique vocal characteristics which made them all around enjoyable. And, in this rare concert-going instance, the house mix was good enough to make out actual lyric content (which was at times just simple “La la la”s). From last night’s experience alone, I would most likely not continue to listen to Brad as there was nothing particularly gripping about their performance or music.

At the end of September, while browsing the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, I ended up “winning” free tickets to the Kaiser Chiefs show at the Beacon Theater. Again, I had not heard their music beforehand, and the show was at the Beacon which has already failed in terms of sound quality on two other occasions. However, as my last.fm page shows, there was something about the show that stuck with me. I immediately purchased their CD from the merch stand and have been listening to it (in full) nearly every day. It clearly was not the venue’s sound quality (which was awful, as always), there was some other “hook” to the music which I am unable to describe since whatever it was was muddy and gross (the sound was distortingly loud and I could barely hear the vocals or guitar at times).

Honestly, I’m not sure where this is going. Basically, I really like the Kaiser Chiefs, and really don’t like the Beacon Theater. At all. I saw Porcupine Tree there and (again) the sound quality was terrible. But for this show, they had ushers all over the place. You weren’t allowed to take pictures. So to enforce this and other rules for each of the 3 aisles there was an usher standing guard and another patrolling back and forth. The patroller was never looking where he was going so he would crash into people leaving the theater for the restroom or getting a beer. While he wasn’t crashing into oncoming guests, he was shining his flashlight into the rows of seats if you moved the wrong way. All very distracting to the show on the stage.

That’s all I suppose. No real purpose here, as usual.

When I finally go to bed tonight I am going to regret having not done it sooner (and yes, I think that sentence makes sense).

I really should have written this post on October 10th when Radiohead’s seventh studio album, In Rainbows, was released as a 160 kbps DRM-Free MP3 download off of the band’s website. The kicker was the fact that the band distributed the release, in the digital format, without a price tag. Users could simply enter any denomination and receive a personal link to a .zip file containing the album’s 10 tracks. Since the release, it has been written that other bands have hopped on board such as Oaisis, and Nine Inch Nails.

The other option available, for those of us who can actually hear the difference between varying bitrates among MP3 files and between those and “full quality”, is to pre-order the album. However, the only configuration is a “Discbox” which contains the album in CD format (with an additional bonus disc) and on two 12″ heavyweight vinyl records. The box also contains both an artwork and lyric booklet. All for a mere £40 which works out to be somewhere in the $80 range.

I figured “what the hell” and, rather than be one of the many who just downloaded the album for $0.00, I bought the Discbox. It will be due to ship sometime around December 3rd. Until then, I’ve got my MP3’s. And I must say, it is a fantastic album all around.

But for those of you who are going to settle with just the downloaded files, you are all going to be missing out. It is a completely different experience when you listen to music directly from a CD. The quality, compared to any bitrate MP3, is unbelievably better. I am always amazed when people are unable to hear the difference. Take better care of your ears, and once in a while put on a CD rather than listen to the compressed files from your iTunes library. 1/10th of the file size means 1/10th of the quality. (Though, I don’t fill up my iPod with uncompressed .wav files. I do, however, frequently go to my rack of CDs and listen to an album from time to time)

I highly recommend purchasing the Canon Powershot SD750 Digital Elph camera. I shot this video at the October 5th Matthew Good show at Club Infinity. Way up in Buffalo, New York. The video is also available on my YouTube page, and will hopefully get put on matthewgood.org soon.

Wow, lots of hyperlinks there. I apologize.

I recommend taking this test at Humanmetrics.com. The results are quite surprisingly accurate. Mine are shown below:

Your Type is: ENTJ (Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging)
You are:

• slightly expressed extravert
• distinctively expressed intuitive personality
• distinctively expressed thinking personality
• distinctively expressed judging personality

Further descriptions found here: Keirsey, Type Logic. (Quoted below)

“I don’t care to sit by the window on an airplane. If I can’t control it, why look?”

“the Fieldmarshals are bound to lead others, and from an early age they can be observed taking command of groups. In some cases, Fieldmarshals simply find themselves in charge of groups, and are mystified as to how this happened.”

Famous ENTJs: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates… etc

Friday marked my latest Matthew Good show (3 total for my entire life). Unfortunately the “Nothing to Hide” tour spans the width of Canada with just one stop into the United States which happens to be no more than 12 miles from the nearest border “as the crow flies”. And that’s 12 miles to Canada, 390 miles from my home.

The trip was absolutely worth it. Rather than write a lengthy review as I did for the Vancouver show, I will just say that the show was great. Much better than Vancouver in most every respect I can think of (though I still think “In a World Called Catastrophe” is a very repetitive song and would have been great if it was just “teased”).

I do have a video of “Avalanche” that I will put on YouTube once I can get the file off of my camera’s SD card. Also, right before Matt came back out for the encore, the entire audience began chanting “K.I.C.K.A.S.S. That’s the way we spell success”. To Matt, I think you should have returned, teased “Giant” and then continued on with your encore.

And to the opening band’s singer, Drew Smith, you sound exactly like Thom Yorke from Radiohead. Play an acoustic cover of one of their songs. It would be great.

I am a little disappointed with the latest release from Matchbox Twenty in about 5 years. I got the new album at work and immediately noticed its weight, exclaiming to myself “2 discs? That’s really cool”. There was in fact 2 CDs, however I had not read anything about the album yet and didn’t know that the second disc was merely a greatest hits compilation. So my initial excitement, thinking this would be on par with something like Foo Fighters’ In Your Honor, was already gone. To further my disappointment, the main disc contained only 6 tracks barely totaling 20 minutes of music. I was able to fit a full listen of the album on my walk from the subway station to the office.

I’ve just purchased the latest release by Porcupine Tree Nil Recurring, 4 tracks totaling nearly a half-hour. And yet, the Porcupine Tree release is marketed as a “Mini-Album” with the tag on their website “Nil Recurring is a completely self-contained and carefully executed work so you can consider this the second (albeit slightly short) Porcupine Tree album release of the year.”

I am unable to comment on the quality of the compositions at the moment since I’ve only given it 1 run through, and it was on my iPod while walking in New York — far from the ideal listening environment. This will be the tell-all since the saying goes “quality over quantity”. Having been produced by Steve Lillywhite and apparently taking a different direction than their previous works, I think the 20 minutes of new material could grow on me.