Hey, Bob Nanna. Nice guitar.

Somehow I always manage to avoid sleep on the three nights a week I need it most–the ones right before my 9AM Newspaper Design class.

Tonight, Bob Nanna of The City on Film (among other bands, like Braid, Hey Mercedes, and the recently formed Certain People I Know) voices my sleepless, restless, and lethargic state perfectly with his song Insomnia.

At least I’ll be done with school for at least a year come May.

Enjoy.

Miles and Hurley, debating the physics of time travel.

I’ve never really been a TV guy.  Sure, there are a select few shows that I’ve followed–The X-Files, Arrested Development, The Office and, most recently, Lost.  Still, I try to keep my watching habits moderate.  But somehow my obsession with Lost has actually turned me into someone who reads about the show immediately after it airs.

God help me.

My source? The TV Club from The Onion’s AV Club.  It’s gotten so bad that I even sift through the hundreds of comments posted by site visitors more impassioned than myself.

Some of my own thoughts on last night’s episode:

• Loved the Back to the Future references.  I’ve been invoking the trilogy regularly when trying to explain Lost to confused newcomers.
• I also thought the conversations between Hurley and Miles were fairly illuminating with regard to a subject that a lot of Lost fans have been debating:  The rules of the Lost universe’s time travel.  Seems to be somewhat fate-centered.
• Can’t stand Kate, or her episodes.  The TV Club fawned over her flashbacks, but they just bored me.
• Sawyer and Juliette=best Lost couple yet.
• Jack’s words are starting to take on a Locke-like mysticism.  Chilling, in my opinion, since they used to be dubbed as somewhat antithetical characters.
• Locke’s smirk adds so much to his character.  Can’t wait to see the confrontation between him and Ben next week.

I was skeptical of this season when it started.  It seemed to be subverting any sort of logical rules.  But I’m totally digging it now.  Just took a little while for me to get acclamated.

It’s probably only a matter of time before I join the fold of TV Club commenters.  But for the time being, I’ll keep my thoughts here.

Until next week.

Tim and Eric of the Awesome Show. Great Job.

Adult Swim is also playing a pretty good April Fool’s joke with a special airing of “The Room.”

“The Room” was released by Wiseau Films in 2003, and you can buy it on Amazon.  From the user reviews:  “It is, without question, the worst film ever made. Including movies made on beta max video cameras in special education high school classes.”

Tim and Eric seem to be behind the airing of the soap opera/softcore feature film starring their recent guest director, Tommy Wiseau.

The acting is terrible, the story barely follows a logical thread, and a message saying “Do NOT duplicate this copyrighted material!” keeps flashing on the bottom of the screen.  Another message asking “What are you fools watching?” also keeps popping up during commercial breaks, and I’ve seen a few advertisements for a spring break update in 15 minutes from Tim and Eric’s MTV personas, Jim and Derrick, but still haven’t seen it in the 45 minutes I’ve been watching.

It’s definitely the purposefully botched brand of humor Tim and Eric love.  And in typical Tim and Eric fashion, it’s infuriating people on the Adult Swim message boards.  I personally am finding the whole ordeal hilarious.

Great job.

Read more about “The Room” and its cult success at NPR.

Warner Brothers loves The Pirate Bay.

Wow.

I logged onto TorrentFreak for the first time in a few days to be met with a shocking announcement:  “Warner Bros. Acquires the Pirate Bay.”

If you know anything about filesharing, you know that this would be an unprecendented corporate embrace of the underground, unfiltered filesharing culture that so many of today’s youth are engulfed in.  Especially since the two have recently been locked in a court dispute that threatens to take down The Pirate Bay.

For a second, I thought I might now have a good place online to legally acquire new music, rather than lamenting over the low quality, Apple formatted, DRM infested files over at iTunes.

April fools.

What a cool glimpse into the lives of Saves the Day and Two Tongues.  A few observations:

• If that’s part of a “Daybreak” song playing at about 1:20, I’m extremely excited.  Sounds funky with a great sense of melody.
• Chris looks a little sad when mentioning that David took a lot of the guitar equipment with him.  Come back, Soloway.
• “Coby was right there… suspended from the ceiling.  Playing drums.  It was really weird.”
• “We drank a lot… of water.”

In other news, there’s a feature on Chris and a book he recently read called “A Path with Heart” by Jack Kornfield on spin.com.  It’s also a great glimpse into the more personal side of Saves the Day, and Chris’s optimism makes me hopeful for the future of one of my favorite bands.  We may yet see “Daybreak” after all.

In the meantime, check out this live performance of the upcoming album’s title track, back before Soloway left:

Depending on the age and degree of musical snobbery of the people I tell this to, I either get looks of intrigued surprise or disgusted disapproval. But either way, I’m always ready to defend my taste. Even on albums as recent as 2003’s relatively unnoticed “Out of the Vein,” the ostensibly throwaway ’90s pop stars were busy muscling up their arena rock anthems with slick riffs played in non-standard tunings, explosive unconventional rhythms and raw, confessional lyrics occasionally delivered with a hint of hip-hop flavor.

I’m not alone on this one, either. The line for non-badge and wristband holders hoping to get a last minute ticket to last night’s showcase at Stubb’s started forming three hours prior to the show and eventually extended the length of the venue and wrapped around the corner.

The band had been rumored for weeks to be debuting their forthcoming album, “Ursa Major,” at Saturday’s showcase at Stubb’s, and with the exception of “Jumper,” “Never Let You Go” and “Crystal Baller,” that turned out to be true. They didn’t even play their breakthrough hit “Semi-Charmed Life,” which was probably confusing to anyone who hadn’t heard them in years, but refreshing to longtime fans.

Unfortunately, the new material was largely hit or miss. Some songs, like “Bonfire” and “A Sharp Knife,” which have been floating around the web in bootleg format for a couple of years, blazed through delayed lead lines and urgent vocal delivery nearly as well as any Third Eye Blind staple. But others were cringe-worthy. In “1 in 10,” frontman Stephan Jenkins sings about trying to “turn butch chicks,” and “About to Break” builds up to the cliché sentiment, “When I see your face/I wanna be in the human race.”

Perhaps most disappointing of all, the cult favorite “Summertown” was completely made over into a tune that takes the hip-hop thing a little too far, with Jenkins proclaiming something about a “rap superstar” at the end. Whatever happened to the UC Berkley English valedictorian who wasn’t afraid to drop allusions to Greek mythology?

But hey, the album’s not out yet. Let’s hope with a few tweaks Third Eye Blind will have something on par with the rest of their catalogue by the end of the summer.

Originally published on the Austin American-Statesman’s Austin360 22 March 2009.

As the leader of Austin’s indie sensation American Analog Set, Kenny built a devoted underground following with his soft-spoken, rustling anthems.

And as fans learned at Saturday’s Barsuk/Merge Records showcase at the Parish, he’s picking up right where he left off with the aptly named Wooden Birds. Much like the songs of the Analog Set’s “Know By Heart,” the new tunes are delicate and organic, with a keen attention paid to intricate detail. Backed by brushed drums and a second percussionist who mostly shakes maracas and tambourines, the songs drift through smooth clean guitar and Kenny’s near-whispered vocals, creating a dreamlike atmosphere.

The simple yet sharp observational nature of the lyrics matched the powerfully understated music, as entire stories were often brewing beneath single stanzas. In set opener “Sugar,” Kenny noted, “Your little brother is a little shy/He keeps a Bible by his bedside/Under a bottle and some dim lamplight.” And in the more upbeat “Seven Seventeen,” he realized, “She was seven when I was seventeen.”

Kenny’s persona couldn’t fit the songs any better. The lanky, bright-eyed and thin-faced bass player bent his knees and grooved his hips to the beat of the midtempo numbers, and when each one was done, he’d turn to his four-piece band and meekly pay them compliments like, “That was pretty good, guys. Great job.”

To the glee of Analog Set fans, the Wooden Birds included a performance of “Aaron and Maria” in their set, but judging by the strength of the new music, they won’t have to rely on old material for long.

Originally published on the Austin American-Statesman’s Austin360 22 March 2009.

But only a minute later into Saturday night’s Merge/Barsuk Records showcase at the Parish, Michael Lerner laid down his small acoustic guitar, took his place behind the drums and never looked back. He and his band ripped through a half hour set of hook-heavy pop that sounded like the near-perfect soundtrack to a sunny day on the Santa Monica pier, but had just the right hint of gritty distortion and foggy melancholy to place it in the Northwest.

For a drummer who simultaneously sings and plays, Lerner was surprisingly accurate on both accounts. With his eyes closed and his head pointed slightly upward toward the microphone above the snare, he banged out rhythms with wildly flailing arms and sang with practically unwavering pitch.

The showcased songs came from Telekinesis’s upcoming self-titled debut, which was produced by Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla, and the similarities between the two artists were apparent. Songs like “Coast of Carolina,” with its jutted blasts of guitar, could almost pass for a Walla solo song or early Death Cab tune if its more famous counterparts were given an adrenaline boost.

Telekinesis might not have the most substantive catalogue just yet, but without so much as an album for sale, their catchy songs and tight live show put them ahead of the game.

Originally published on the Austin American-Statesman’s Austin360 22 March 2009.

If that sounds heady and slightly depressing, it is. But at Amidon’s Friday performance at the top floor of the Hilton Garden Inn, the twenty-something musician offset the seriousness of his music perfectly with a bizarre brand of deadpan humor.

Amidon began the set with his somber acoustic version of “Wild Bill Jones,” a usually upbeat bluegrass number about a murder committed in cold blood out of jealousy for another’s love. At the peak of the song, just as Jones is shot down, Amidon sang, “He let out a dreadful moan.”

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR,” he then screeched with a straight face for a good minute. When he finally dove back into the song, the befuddled audience erupted in laughter and applauded.

The set was full of similar surprises. During a bluesy banjo number, Amidon repeatedly asked, “Whaddya say, banjo?” before his smooth-moving solos. At the end of the song, he walked to the back of the stage and asked, “Whaddya say, pushups?” Then he did twenty or so. Again, the audience ate it up.

Humor aside, the music and the stories behind it were captivating. In “Saro,” an immigrant to the United States pined for the love he left behind, while in “O Death” the speaker pleads with his inevitable end to “Spare me over just another year.”

To wrap things up, Amidon enlisted the audience to help him sing the words to “Relief” by R. Kelly: “Isn’t it a relief/That we are one/The war is over/There’s an angel in the sky/Love is still alive.”

“It’s not true, but I guess it’s a nice thought,” he said.

Originally published on the Austin American-Statesman’s Austin360 21 March 2009.

And indeed, everything about Loney Dear’s opening gig for Andrew Bird at the Paramount last month was freaking marvelous — the venue, the sound, the band.

The band’s South by Southwest performance wasn’t bad, but it was certainly different. Svanangen had a few less members and thus a few less instruments backing him. Paired with the lack of the Paramount’s stunning acoustics, Loney Dear sounded less like a twinkly, floating folk with charming melodic sensibility than stripped-down, hard-driving rock backed by electronic samples.

And unfortunately for audience members near the back of the venue, the door to the bar had to remain open for the majority of the show because of fire hazard restrictions, so the sounds of the pounding blues band inside collided with Loney Dear’s melody-driven music to create an awful mess of sound.

But that was hardly the band’s fault, and near the front of the stage, the samples that backed songs like “Airport Surroundings” and “Everything Turns to You” from the band’s latest album, “Dear John,” raced forward and got the crowd moving, while the backing vocals from the new female keyboardist resonated with a haunting echo.

Other songs, like the ambient “I Was Only Going Out” just sounded out of place at a venue that gave the music such a rough edge.

It was a decent performance by Loney Dear, but it definitely highlighted the difference a venue can make.

Originally published on the Austin American-Statesman’s Austin360 21 March 2009.