List #12: A New Set of Awesome Albums

Hey there, long time no write! Most of these have been around for a while (if not all of them, the list isn’t quite set in stone right now) but I just discovered them, and so, yeah.

Dark at the End of the Tunnel — Oingo Boingo

[This album is just super classic eighties. And also Danny Elfman, so how can you go wrong. Oingo Boingo came up recently when Danny Elfman was being discussed, and I listened to the one album I had and loved it, so acquired the rest of their stuff. It's really good! Except for their live album, which has too much guitar.]

Tapestry — Carole King

[Well, I knew I was bound to love this when I heard it, given that it's one of the top-selling albums ever, and everyone else loves it. Now I know why. I actually just randomly came across this when someone returned it at the library where I work.]

More Adventurous — Rilo Kiley

[I have had Under the Blacklight for a while, and liked a few songs on it (especially "15" and "Breaking Up") so I figured I should check out the rest of the band's stuff. More Adventurous does not have a bad track, in my opinion. In researching what album to check out, I discovered that Rilo Kiley is the band, not a person. Who knew? Not me.]

Who Do You Think You Are — Dala

[I discovered Dala at the Newport Folk Festival, as I am sure I have written about. Oddly, I realized that, though their most recent album (Everyone is Someone) has some better songs, the better album is their earlier one. Weird.]

And, last but not least, but it doesn’t quite count as an album:

Live in London — Leonard Cohen

[This shouldn't count because it's live, but it's still really good. Great back-up people really make it work.]

List #5: The Last Ten Albums I’ve Gotten

Apparently I’m on a music kick right now. What follows is a list of the last ten albums I’ve gotten through some means. Some I have not paid money for, but for a few that is legal, and others less so. There’s more music that I’ve gotten recently, but I’m not counting anything that is not a full album, and also no samplers. (Very) short reviews of each album follow.

• Kyle Gabler – “World of Goo Soundtrack” [This is the soundtrack to a pretty fun game I've downloaded the demo of, very atmospheric and entertaining music, available for free on his website. Not as good as some of the others in this list, but then again it's not a professional quality, money-making album.]
• The String Quartet – “Tribute to the Killers” [Hot Fuss played on violins and cellos. Need I say more? This is awesome, and I will buy it as soon as I have disposable income. Let's just say I'm previewing it at the moment.]
• Chairlift – “Does You Inspire You” [The single from this album, "Bruises," was apparently popularized through an iPod commercial. I found out about it in this video about squirrels. The single is great (and will be featured in an upcoming list of "Songs I've Been Addicted to at Various Times in My Life," the rest of the album is pretty good too, but in retrospect I probably should have just bought the single.]
• Neko Case – “Middle Cyclone” [I only recently discovered Neko Case, and, as such, felt required to buy her newest album when it came out. It's really cool; love songs written by tornados, tigers, and so on. Pretty sweet. Favorite track: "People Got A Lotta Nerve." Second favorite? The half hour of crickets at the end. Really. Very relaxing.]
• She & Him – “Volume One” [This is one of the very few bands that I'm fairly proud of finding out about before most people have. It's a collaboration between M. Ward (whose solo stuff I actually don't like much) and Zooey Deschanel. A mix of newish sounding stuff and their covers of sixties doowop, it's a very odd but very nice sound. Favorite track: "Sweet Darlin'," which I have no idea whether it is a cover or not.]
• Barenaked Ladies – “Live at Universal Studios” [A nice set recorded as their first gig without former frontman Steven Page. Still pretty good, but it's a little lacking. I really like the track "For You," which again I don't know if it is a cover, a new song, or what. They offered this briefly for free to the subscribers of their mailing list, which was nice.]
• The Weepies – “Hideaway” [I love this band, and have successfully shown them to a few of my friends, who are spreading the word. A married couple of songwriters, they do great songs, trading off in a sound that for some reason I can only describe as "small." But that's a good thing. "Antarctica" is a wonderful track to check out. I got another album at the same time, but I like this one better and I figure one per artist is good.]
• The Decemberists – “The Hazards of Love” [Another album I'm "previewing," I don't find this as compelling as their earlier stuff. It's not the ballad-y folk-opera-ness of it, since I loved "The Crane Wife," but I think this is just less interesting than it could be. I was also disappointed that the song "Annan Waters" was not actually a straight version of the Irish ballad I love and have many versions of, but rather an interpretation of it. Ah well. It's still probably my favorite track, but since I find this album fairly mediocre it's kind of hard to pick. Yet I'll still see them in concert next week.]
• Girl Talk – “Feed the Animals” [If you haven't heard Girl Talk before, check him (yes, him) out. He remixes lots of pop songs together to make completely new things. This really features one of my favorite things in music, when melodies combine unexpectedly. First track I heard was "In Step," which is pretty great.]
• Death Cab For Cutie – “Narrow Stairs” [Another album I was looking forward to so downloaded, and another one that I wasn't really impressed with. I don't even have a favorite track. But I have a suspicion my copy doesn't have all the tracks, so I'll have to check out the real thing and see how I feel.]

Sorry to end the list on sort of a lame note, but that’s pretty much the order they came in, from most recent to least. I hope this turns you on to some new music, or justifies some opinion you’ve already had of a band. As a final request, can someone PLEASE tell me what the official way to list albums is? Is it italics, or quotes, or…

List #4: Ten Albums I Like A Lot

This is not a top ten, by any means. I’ve never been good at ranking things like music or movies, even enough to pick a definite “favorite” (although the two movies I would be happy watching without any others for the rest of my life would be Airplane and Independence Day with Jaws and Bladerunner somewhere in the vicinity as well). But, I know which ones I like. Here are ten of them. I’m using bullets instead of numbers because they are all pretty much equal in my mind. I’m also not counting live albums I like a lot because those are a lot like greatest hits albums, but with cheering, so it shouldn’t count.

• Radiohead – OK Computer
• The Killers – Hot Fuss
• The Decemberists – The Crane Wife
• The Magnetic Fields – 69 Love Songs Volume 2 [I figure it would be cheating to have the full 3-CD set.]
• Guster – Parachute [This is an old one but I only just discovered it]
• The Weepies – Hideaway [This is really great. Their other one, Say I Am You is less good but still nice.]
• Ben Folds – Rockin’ The Suburbs [Except for the title track which I really hate.]
• William Shatner – Has Been [I got this as a semi-joke gift because it's William Shatner. But, it's actually really good... Weird, I know, but check it out.]
• Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms
• Meatloaf – Bat Out of Hell

Okay so the last two I started scrolling through my iTunes to find. But, as I said, this isn’t necessarily a top ten, so it’s okay to do that. I would really enjoy listening to any of these again. What’s also nice is that all of these, with perhaps the exception of Bat Out of Hell and Has Been are really good to listen to just a song at a time, and yet all are still amazing as actual albums (except for Rockin’ the Suburbs, where I have to skip Track 9 every time). It’s good when an album is greater than the some of its parts, but the parts are still great in themselves. Anyway, if you haven’t heard any of these, check them out!

Technological Frustration

This is halfway between a complaint and a public service announcement. I just spent three hours dealing with a problem that should have never existed in the first place. Basically, ever since a little bit before spring break, my printer had not worked. Sort of. It’s one of those cool all-in-one deals that can scan and copy, as well as print. And the scanning and copying worked fine; the pictures got on to my computer and everything. But pressing Apple-P just didn’t work: I got a weird error message saying that the computer could not connect to the printer. Which is a blatant lie, because I could scan, and so the printer and computer were talking.

But, as I said, this was just before spring break, so I just shut everything down, went home, and hoped that it would get better with time. Which it didn’t. I needed to print out an application for a job today, and the same problem happened. So, I deleted the printer drivers and reinstalled them from the HP site. No good. I then deleted them and reinstalled them from Apple Software Update (it is handy that you can download drivers direct from Apple, because it can tell which ones you need). Also didn’t work. So, I tried deleting everything having to do with printing and resetting the preferences, restarting the computer…. Nothing. Finally I looked online (this is after about three hours, and redownloading the stupid drivers about 10 separate times), and randomly found the problem.

The problem is Apple’s most recent Security Update (2008-002). But not by itself, no. That would be too easy. It’s the newest update combined with another program: Audio Hijack Pro. This is actually a very useful program; it can record audio, which is cool, but I already have something that does that. What I use it for is something that Apple really should build in to computers: the ability to mute individual applications. So often I’m playing a flash game online that doesn’t have a volume control, which is lame. So, I just use Audio Hijack Pro to mute Firefox, and I can still listen to iTunes and hear alerts and everything. Very cool. Anyway, as you can see from that description, Audio Hijack Pro has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH PRINTING!!!!!! And yet, it still screws it up. In combination with the Security Update. Luckily someone (I have NO idea how) figured out that this was the problem, and they’ve released an update to AHP that fixes it.

So now I can print. Woohoo. But seriously, that problem made NO sense and shouldn’t have existed.

Now I’m listening to the album “The Reminder” by Feist, which is on many 2007 top ten album lists. It’s pretty good, but… I was about to say I like the Amy Winehouse album better (because it’s somewhat similar), and then I realised that on the particular list I was looking at, Back to Black was number one. So, people agree with me. Or rather, since I’m rather late, I agree with people.

More on albums later, as I’m experimenting with only listening to full albums. As is my brother.

That is all.

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