Wait, Ricky Gervais DIDN'T do this?! - I'd Like To Have Been In That Meeting...

These guys have been around for a while, but they've gotten some attention lately thanks to this spoof on the production of the Lost opening credits.


This one's pretty good too. Even if you don't know anything about Des'ree post "You Gotta Be."

Album Cover Of The Day

Mississippi Woman by Sherman "Moody" Thomas

"Moody" on Digstation

There are some Track Titles of the year on this thing too...

1. Dirty Old Man
2. Dip My Dipper
3. Mississippi Woman
4. Dirty Sheets
5. Cheated Myself
6. Buttermilk & Cornbread
7. God's Gift
8. Back That Thang Up
9. Damn Fool Ain't My Middle Name
10. She's Your Wife (But She's My Woman Tonight)

11. Another Man's Name
12. Banging The Headboard

That's Awesome!

Just days after being used as a joke by some minor model in Maxim's Top 100 special (seriously, I can't believe the average Maxim reader knows these high-fashion models by name) Tripper Harrison is back in the news. His wife of 11 years is filing for divorce, and judging by her stated grounds, it sounds like Bill Murray's role in Lost In Translation wasn't too much of a stretch:

The complaint, which doesn't specify instances of Murray's alleged marijuana or alcohol use, alleges he would often leave without telling his wife and says he "travels overseas where he engages in public and private altercations and sexual liaisons."

Haha, Bill Murray is SO AWESOME! Oh...wait...

It also alleges Murray physically abused his wife and last November "hit her in the face and then told her she was 'lucky he didn't kill her.' "

Wow, Steve Zissou a wifebeater...ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...that's not awesome...Not awesome at all...

Glow In The Dark in Chicago

"Sure it was an ego-trip, but goddamnit he pulled it off; the best time ever; regained my faith in hip-hop/music/god; NERD/Rihanna/Lupe was way better than expected, but we're here for KANYE!; concert of a lifetime, cause this is in the Chi baby!!! "etc.

The hot dogs at United Center are really, really good. Seriously. Maybe not $5 for-an-unadorned-dog good, but close. The beer selection was lackluster, although the plastic lids were a clever move. Fries were crispy, salty, and came in generous portions. A steal at $3 a box. Seating was comfortable and clean. Until the girl in front of us threw up. Location was a little hard for those planning to find a cab, but entrance was swift and restrooms were not overly crowded.

Good times, great sausages

It's So Brilliant It's Retarded

Apparently this has been out for a while but I just saw it for the first time on AS tonight.

Wow.

Unlike a lot of people, I don't mind the newer Family Guy episodes because:

a. In many ways the show has evolved and become funnier, even if certain aspects are different (Stewie, for example).

b. I haven't had to watch these episodes a million times on DVD while at my friend's dealer's apartment, waiting for them to finish haggling in the kitchen.

Unfortunately, I do have to agree with the complaint that the show has gotten overly self-referential. I'm so bloody sick of calm, mustached, gay-guy. And Peter always hurting his knee. And the Chris-loving-old-pedophile. And Chris Griffin. Just Chris Griffin, as a character in general.

So whose brilliant idea was it to combine a show criticized for being too meta with the most meta-riffic franchise in history? I don't know. Probably Seth Green. He's a genius, let's give him creative control of things. (I'm not going to get into the whole Robot-Chicken thing. There version was better, and as such is a pretty compelling argument for why this should never have been made. But that would be complimenting Seth Green. And that I cannot do)

So basically it's an hour of watching minor Family Guy characters being arbitrarily crammed into various Star Wars roles (while hilariously utilizing their "well-fleshed-out" FG personalities...). Any "remember this hilarious guy"-free moment is taken up with plot-holes being picked apart, you know, the favoUrite hobby of15-year-olds-watching-Empire-Strikes-Back-for-the-first-time-since-early-childhood the world over.

The other big problem is that Chris Griffin, that guy who won the Most Likely To Be The Worst Part Of Good Things award back in high school, is the character filling Luke Skywalker's pearly robes, so there's a LOT of that to put with. (Seriously, why do all these people keep Seth Green around? They need his Hollywood good-looks? I guess genius loves company. I wonder if that Family Guy bit about Ben Affleck's contribution to Good Will Hunting set off any alarms in that ginger-frosted head.)

Actually, though, the most agonizing thing about all of this is realizing that those way-too-long Star-Wars-joke vignettes that have been happening like 18 times an episode for the past few seasons were even MORE ridiculously unnecessary than I previously assumed, given that they were given an HOUR-LONG episode to get-it-all-out.

But despite all that I must say one thing: Thank you for the Simply Red reference Seth MacFarlane. You brought something really special back into my life.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. Want to fall from the stars...

Sway! Yoda!

Wow! Finally two British artists I couldn't care less about have come together to create something that's actually pretty...pretttty...pretttttttty good:

DJ Yoda Feat. Sway - Chatterbox

Favourite parts (that's right, its a U, calm down yankee):

1. Anytime Sway says hello. Its quick, because Sway has some important information to get to.

2. The breakdown where it sounds like Sway has just gone into the club's bathroom, where his computer is located(?) because he has to Google himself. Many different links come up. Some of these links are good, some of them are bad, some make him happy, but some make him...?

It's on FabricLive39, part of the FabricLive series of live sets at Fabric in London. The rest of the mix (by Yoda) isn't terrible either.

Album Cover of the Day

Gay Happening is a long running series of CD's and DVD's featuring compilations of gay-interest music or music frequently heard in gay clubs.

Vol. 17 is a pretty standard entry, containing a list of tracks from several contemporary gay trance and glam acts, and a cover depicting a mostly nude and well-toned male body. (There is generally not much variation, the inclusion of a disco ball or the model doing the slightly-scared-farmboy-in-overalls look being among the more common twists).

What makes this particular Gay Happening cover (and CD) so special are the words written on the little gold tag in the bottom-left corner:

That's right.


Yatta!


Who knew a camp video featuring Japanese comedians dancing badly to a nonsensical song while wearing nothing but Hanes and a giant leaf would become a cult-classic in the gay community?! If only that kid in high-school who really loved the Japanese shows on Fox's "Worlds Craziest Game Shows" - or the slightly more advanced kid who owned the first DVD of Neon Genesis Evangelion, played Starcraft on Korean servers, and knew that Yatta! was actually a joke - had known this was what the future held. Maybe then they'd have stopped forcing other kids to watch their stupid Japanese comedy videos - or forcing other kids to watch their stupid Japanese comedy videos then mocking those kids for not realizing that the stupid video was SUPPOSED to be for comedy. How's the JET program going guys?

Album Cover of the Day

The Rain Man

I just found this newly released CD by Rasaan J. "The Rain Man." Judging by his elongated name, this guy just can't choose between two different options that he thinks are both TOTALLY AWESOME!

And that's how Let's Ride goes for the most part. Producers DJ Boom and Scotty Beam rip-off every major producer of the last decade, from the Neptunes to Mannie Fresh, while Rasaan happily does his Flo-Rida/one-man-band thing over whatever they serve up. T-Pain HIMSELF even shows up for a bewildering two minute cameo. (At least I think it's T-Pain? You couldn't fake that voice right? It'd be impossible, right?) But the point is, despite it being an album featuring only a couple of producers, and one MC, it's all over the place, the artists refusing to commit to one sound or another.

It's harmless, faceless fun until everyone decides they want to spend the album's second half auditioning for G-Unit. Fifty does seem willing to hire various producers to rewrite "Magic Stick" for him over and over again, so who knows - maybe they actually have a shot.

Everything is redeemed, however by third track "Brazilian Shores." Apparently included amongst DJ Boom's 9,302 major influences is the Japanese shibuya-kei scene, and this track sounds like a DJ has taken source material popularized by a Fantastic Plastic Machine mix and mashed it with a dirty south club banger. Except it's an original track. Chron-didddly-on.

Actually, he probably just thought "Hips Don't Lie" was a sweet jam, typed "senorita musica" into Soulseek and ripped this one off too. But whatever. I prefer more meta in my explanations.

Unfortunately this track isn't up on his Myspace, although there is a high budget, on-location music video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M45WGGtrQp8

What the f@ck, I can't embed?!

Oh...

Also, for no particular reason, Pes is my hero:

Review: Shibboleth - Experiment in Error

7/10

Experiment In Error is a title that set me up to be hoodwinked the first time I tried giving Shibboleth's debut album a listen. To be precise, it was the word "experiment" that got me into trouble, lending my ear the bias brought on by what the term has come to mean in our 21st century pop-music world.

The first notes of the album-opener "The 1912 Horsey Rebellion," with its easy Caribbean guitars segueing into a cantering Mexican ride through the desert, immediately brought to mind the Avalanches Since I Left You, (and the associations most people who've listened to that album have with horses probably didn't help either). After a couple more tracks that were reminiscent of El Guincho and Panda Bear respectively, I felt sure I was in for a pleasant review of the best "experimental" styles of the past decade, performed by a group with a thorough knowledge of how to recreate the technology-based achievements of their recent ancestors.

As the album progressed, however, some things began to nag at me. First, I was twenty minutes into this experimental odyssey and I hadn't heard a single vocal. More importantly, I hadn't heard a single sampled vocal. Then there was the song structure - every track flowed seamlessly from beginning to end in the most languid, gradual way possible. Where were the epic time-changes, the bursts of static, or the occasional free-flying leaps over suddenly low-fi backing beats?

Getting a little curious, I headed over to Shibboleth's My Space, where I experienced a shocking revelation. "Instrumental"? "Surf Rock"? Wait a minute, is Shibboleth...A JAM BAND!?

This is definitely a gross-over simplification, but to many music fans, the definition of "experiment" has changed over the past few decades. Today experimentation means samplers and Panda Bear. Thirty years ago, it meant LSD and the Dead. To a lot people engaged in the music scene today, groups like Animal Collective and the Avalanches are OUR jam bands. The same creative approach is used, resulting in a similar tone being set, despite the use of wildly different technological approaches. Jamie Lidell's live vocal-sample ziggurats are today's never-ending acid guitar solos. Oh god...

But the point about Experiment In Error is that to a member of Generation Y it will sound a hell of a lot like the Panda Bear or El Guincho. If this album gets a wide audience, you can bet we'll be seeing aspiring producers making Shibboleth-based mix-tapes in the hopes of getting signed to Star Trak.

What makes it great is that Shibboleth, like fellow sonic-landscapers Ratatat, does this using traditional rock-band instruments. It’s marvelous to realize that what you thought were cleverly used classic synth-line samples are actually the original creations of keyboardist Rich Martin. The rhythmic choices he makes are always unique - at times it sounds like he's trying to imitate a melody he created earlier on Fruity Loops or Cubase and he does a damn good job of it too. The versatility of bassist James Driscoll and guitarist Don Cento is also impressive, as they seem to find a unique way to approach most songs.

The album has a few standouts. "Meatballs" is the album's only real rocker, and it does a great job combining a little eighties-synthesizer menace with some T.Rex sex appeal. A mid-album double bill - "Knute," a lazy cruise down the strip at sunset with Steely Dan; and "Do Not Forsake Me. Billy Bremner," the only track with a surprise ending - is the high point of the release. The other tracks are consistently solid, although the fifteen tracks presented could definitely be trimmed down a bit. "Goats Across The Fire" is really just a rehash of "The 1912 Horsey Rebellion," and its inclusion, along with a few of the other weaker tracks, detracts from the band's otherwise impressive versatility. Again, it’s even more astounding in this day and age that such range is achieved using acquired technique rather than crate-digging.

Experiment In Error is a great album that will sound familiar to fans of this decade's sampler-using indie-stars. At the same time they might wonder, as I do, whether Shibboleth are just a very methodical band heavily influenced by groups like The Shadows or the Dead, or if they're a group trying to recreate their contempories’ Picasso-ed images using a conventional palette. Or both. Realizing Shibboleth was a band using regular instruments was kind of like hearing that Jamie Foxx was actually singing Ray Charles's bit on Kanye West's "Gold Digger." Except with Foxx my reaction was "Why? Necessary?" With Shibboleth, the value-added is clear to anyone willing to give Experiments in Error a listen.

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