for4saken's Last.fm Journal

New similiar tracks thing

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 04:33:07 +0000

So, this new similar track thing gives a lot of strange results.

For example, take a look at Starálfur's similar tracks.

Some of the listed tracks:

Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor? Ok, post-rock...

But, Coldplay, Wilco, Sufjan Stevens, Interpol, The Postal Service, Jeff Buckley?! Seriously?!

Massive Attack's Teardrop kind of has a similar beat, though.

Thinking about...

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 20:58:38 +0000

Some years ago, I put much thinking on the war subject. I couldn't picture myself fighting a war, there couldn't be any pride in doing that. Time passed and I didn't put much of thinking on it again. Until this week.

Last Monday, I watched Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima (Iwo jima kara no tegami), Golden Globe awarded as Best Foreign Language Film. It sure is a great movie; however, not a masterpiece. Beside its technical achievements, its best strength is in the simple yet powerful history of men (not heroes) caught in a war that they clearly don't know what's about. Also, the peculiar way that the characters are presented, through the letters they write to their families, is very touching. The conflict of surrendering or fighting without hope is very well depicted.

Heck, I would be a deserter, without any doubt.

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Yesterday I had a full moment of life and happiness, one of those instants that just gives you reason to live one more day.

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And today, I listened to one of Jason Isbell's debut solo album (Sirens Of The Ditch) songs.

This guy knows how to write a song, there could be any questions, not after Outfit, Decoration Day, Danko/Manuel, The Day John Henry Died, Easy on Yourself, and Goddamn Lonely Love, all of Drive-By Truckers tracks that I like the best, the ones that make me love the band.

On Dress Blues he sings the side of war that people usually choose to ignore and forget. It was written and sung with a Southern accent, what just empower the message and the sad reality of many families of the region. Extremely touching, even to a Brazilian like myself.

It's one of those songs that gives you goose bumps, and right at the very beginning when he sings "Maybe 18 was too early / Maybe 30 or 40 is too".

The focus in the small details just amplifies some sense of universality, despite characterizing a very personal matter, because Jason wrote the song about a friend of his from Muscle Shoals, AL, who joined the Marines, was shipped off to Iraq and, well, never returned.

Maybe it is the greatest song about war that I ever heard.

Amazon has a live video performance.

What can you see from your window?
I can't see anything from mine.
Flags on the side of the highway
and scripture on grocery store signs.
Maybe eighteen was too early.
Maybe thirty or forty is too.
Did you get your chance to make peace with the man
before he sent down his angels for you?

Mamas and grandmamas love you
'cause that's all they know how to do.
You never planned on the bombs in the sand
or sleeping in your dress blues.

Your wife said this all would be funny
when you came back home in a week.
You'd turn twenty-two and we'd celebrate you
in a bar or a tent by the creek.
Your baby would just about be here.
Your very last tour would be up
but you won't be back. They're all dressing in black
drinking sweet tea in styrofoam cups.

Mamas and grandmamas love you.
American boys hate to lose.
You never planned on the bombs in the sand
or sleeping in your dress blues.

Now the high school gymnasium's ready,
full of flowers and old legionnaires.
Nobody showed up to protest,
just sniffle and stare.
But there's red, white, and blue in the rafters
and there's silent old men from the corps.
What did they say when they shipped you away
to fight somebody's Hollywood war?

Nobody here could forget you.
You showed us what we had to lose.
You never planned on the bombs in the sand
or sleeping in your dress blues.

No, no you never planned on the bombs in the sand
or sleeping in your dress blues.

And now I'm thinking about how much I want to live.

Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 02:36:52 +0000

It happened one year ago, when I attended an open air performance by the
Brazilian Symphonic Orchestra (OSB).

I usually don't like this kind of event, but one shouldn't miss a concert by such an amazing orchestra, specially a free one. ;)

They played several pieces from brazilian composers, as the first act of Carlos Gomes's O Guarani. Starting with Hino Nacional Brasileiro (national anthem), sung by the 15 thousand attendees. I'm not a patriotic person, but that was a powerful experience, it even gave me goose bumps.

The conductor, Roberto Minczuk, who is also the Music Director of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, acted like a showman; talking to the audience, explaining the basics of an orchestra, asking for a solo of every instrument and commenting all the pieces played, and he did it all very well; I guess it was a wonderful first encounter with classical music for most of the people there.

But, the point of this journal is that one of the musics presented was an excerpt from Alexander Borodin's unfinished opera, Prince Igor.

Minczuk told us that the opera was finished by another composer, Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov. And the beauty of the song made a major impression in me.

Right after the concert, I ran to search more information about Glazunov and his compositions. And ended up downloading his String Quartets.

And I finally got to what motivated this journal, the splendid, marvelous; most beautiful string composition I ever heard.

There are 7, all amazing.

I can't even try to review them, I'm mesmerized by it, and it's been one year now...

My favorites things ... mis cosas favoritas

Fri, 11 May 2007 02:00:18 +0000

Respondiendo a una solicitación de un nuevo gran amigo, voy intentar eligir mis álbumes predilectos de jazz, además, regalar sugerencias de todos los estilos.

--

Para empezar, pues, mi favorito de todos los tiempos:

Clifford Brown With Strings

Clifford Brown, Brownie, es uno de los trompetistas que mas admiro. Ese álbum tuvo el arreglo clásico por Neal Hefti, pero no es nada excepcional.
Brownie es la estrella acá y es su brillo que hace ese disco tan sensacional.

John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman

Ahí tenemos un dueto, pero uno muy especial: la voz incomparable de Johnny Hartman y el saxofón maestro de John Coltrane.
Son unos 30 minutos del mas bello jazz ya hecho, una mezcla inesperada, no obstante, perfecta.

The Sidewinder

Entonces, vamos continuar hablando de trompetistas y hard bop.
AMG lo tiene correcto, The Sidewinder es una canción infecto-contagiosa, que tiene influencia latina y del R&B ... no consigo controlar a mis pies, mis manos también se vuelven locas ... ¡muy, pero muy, bueno!

Dream Keeper. With The Liberation Music Orchestra

Ahora, algo completamente diferente, un mix de música sudamericana y africana, de una carga espiritual fortísima, no hay como no sentirse elevado por los himnos del contrabajista Charlie Haden, aun mas para alguien como yo, que tiene la música por religión.

Time Out

La obra maestra de Dave Brubeck, ritmicamente innovador y provocativo, empezando con Blue Rondo à la Turk, hay acá una riqueza musical incomparable.
¡Definitivamente: cool!

Friday Night in San Francisco

La reunión acústica de tres de los mejores guitarristas del mundo: Paco de Lucía, Al Di Meola y John Maclaughlin. Una noche (y una grabación) memorable, onde apenas Mediterranean Sundance / Rio Ancho ya vale por todo el disco.

April In Paris

Un clásico instantáneo (¡de música de la década de treinta en los años cincuenta!).
La elegancia del jazz de orquesta, así se puede definir ese álbum del genio Count Basie.

Night Train

Cuando mis pasiones andan juntas...
Vine a conocer el grandioso pianista Oscar Peterson mientras leía lo que también podemos llamar una obra maestra del jazz. Hablo de Rayuela, libro de Julio Cortázar, también un adicto al jazz. A Oliveira y La Maga les gustaban Peterson, pues a mi también.

Nothing Serious

Bienvenidos a 2006.
Obviamente, el jazz no esta muerto, tenemos óptimos músicos en la actualidad. Yo asistí a una presentación de Roy Hargrove y puedo confirmar el oportunismo de su apodo: "young lion".

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Listo, nueve discos, no quiero hacer un 'top 10'...

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¡No me puedo olvidar de recomendar a Almost Blue!

Chet Baker canta la composición de Elvis Costello.

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Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, Thelonious Monk, Blake, Shorter, Smith, Young, Griffin, Dolphy, Silver, Mingus, Rollins... son tantos los que no están en la lista, pero todos podrían estar, con seguridad.

Drums and Guns

Mon, 9 Apr 2007 02:49:35 +0000

Então, disco novo: Drums and Guns.

Soou como um álbum de remixes, estranho isso; estranho porque é diferente de tudo que o Low já havia gravado.

Isso, claro, por causa da bateria e do tom eletrônico.

O álbum todo meio que funciona nessa tônica: bateria marcante (marcial?) e batida eletrônica, rivalizando com o poderoso, dramático e emocional dueto de Alan Sparhawk e Mimi Parker.

Enfim, bom, muito bom.

Clipe 'ao vivo' de Murderer:

Reviews profissionais:
AllMusicGuide
Pitchfork

slowcore

Bad motherfucker (x5)

Thu, 9 Nov 2006 13:31:19 +0000

"Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking bands on this motherfucking scene!"

Esses noruegueses ganham fácil qualquer concurso de nome de banda mais foda/fudido/fodaço : The Samuel Jackson Five

Ainda bem que a música deles também não fica muito atrás, estavam em tour com Dirty Three e Sigur Rós.

Já lançaram 2 álbuns muito bons:

Same Same but Different
Easily Misunderstood

Recomendadíssimo, it's post-rock motherfucker !

Cover matadora

Tue, 7 Nov 2006 14:05:27 +0000

Cover matadora de Hey Ya! por Obadiah Parker:

Amigdalite

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 01:09:13 +0000

Vamos continuar falando de Black Sheep Boy então.

E com a palavra Will Sheff:

For a few years now, I’d had the idea to do a record called Black Sheep Boy. It started during a time when I was listening to a lot of Tim Hardin and generally marveling at his short, gem-like songs, his tight and concise language, his beautiful and polished singing voice, his everything I’ve always had no clue how to skillfully imitate. As I listened over and over again to Tim Hardin 1 and Tim Hardin 2, I kept coming back to the simple and forceful little song “Black Sheep Boy,” whose general message seemed to be “I know I’m fucking up. Please leave me alone.” One day I was lying in bed and I had this idea out of nowhere to title an album after Hardin’s song. Immediately I envisioned the William Schaff drawing, and then went off on a reverie about Black Sheep Boy action figures, comic books, tie-ins. The idea started out as a joke with myself but slowly began turning into something I couldn’t leave alone and I always had rattling around in the back of my head.

In 2004 I broke up with a girlfriend of four years, quit my job, moved out of my home, and spent the rest of the year on the road, both touring with Okkervil and going to visit friends or to hide away and write. My commitment to touring as much as possible made me feel like a stranger when I came back to Austin, and everybody else in the band started feeling that way, too. At the same time, we were feeling like strangers in the country we were seeing whip by the van windows. It felt like America was starting to go insane, or we were starting to go insane, or probably both. The gorier and more lurid the newspapers got, the harder everyone seemed to be trying to demonstrate how moral, compassionate, and prosperous they were. I had never been further from prosperous, didn’t feel particularly moral, and I started realizing how guilty I’d sometimes been of simply making a show of compassion without actually practicing it. Listening to “Black Sheep Boy” and to old songs like “Knoxville Girl,” “Greenback Dollar,” “Furry’s Blues,” and “The Bully,” I was starting to get this idea in my head of a record that wasn’t compassionate, wasn’t moral, was openly an inelegant and ugly mess.

Most of the songs for the new record were written last February in Bloomington, Indiana. To get away from Austin and from everything else that was familiar, I decided to take up Darius Van Arman from Jagjaguwar on his offer of a place to stay in his usually empty house in the country. I liked the idea of being relatively isolated and of going North for the winter instead of South. Up in Bloomington, I’d set myself a daily writing shift, just like a job; I’d wake up at 10 and write until about 7 PM. One day, for fun, I decided to write a sequel to “Black Sheep Boy.” Because I’m not Tim Hardin, my sequel ended up being about five times longer than the original. The song just kept going and going and going, petering out at around nine minutes. I called it “Black Sheep Boy II” (though we eventually changed the name to “So Come Back, I Am Waiting” when we were working up the Black Sheep Boy artwork). After “Black Sheep Boy II” came “Black Sheep Boy III” (now called “In a Radio Song”), and then “Black Sheep Boy”s IV and V, which didn’t make it to the finished record. And then many of the other songs on the record tumbled out, one after the other. I left Bloomington with the greater part of Black Sheep Boy composed.

For the rest of the year, we toured incessantly while I obsessed about the record, tweaking the language and generally obsessing about the concept to the point where I think my friends were starting to worry about me. All I could think about was how I couldn’t wait to make this record, how I hoped I wouldn’t die in on the interstate so I could finish the record. This gives you an idea of how melodramatic I was getting, though we did in fact have a calamitous accident outside of Topeka in the freezing rain when the car I was driving in skidded two 360's and slammed backwards into the left lane median, and a semi bearing down on us locked its brakes and almost jackknifed trying to avoid crashing into us.

I was overjoyed when, during a headline tour, we finally got to work up new songs like “For Real,” “Black,” and “Black Sheep Boy”s III and V. When we got back from tour, we rented a little tin shack by the Austin Bergstrom Internation Airport and immediately started intensive rehearsals for the album. Unfortunately, the air conditioners in the shack weren’t working and the average temperature hovered around 97%. We’d sit in the shack in underwear and soaked t-shirts and play and play until the auto detailing place across the lot from us couldn’t stand it anymore. Then we moved everything to Brian Beattie’s house and started recording all day and night every day. We’d play the songs all together in the wooden livingroom and bedrooms, with almost no track separation. When we were exhausted everybody would head home and I’d drive back to the little shack to sleep, and then I’d wake up, grab some breakfast tacos and coffee, and start again.

The record took about three times longer to finish than I’d expected. But I’d expected that. As we worked, William Schaff’s artwork started to pour in. It was beautiful and terrifying and slightly heavy-metal-looking, all of which pleased us. I’d gone to Providence earlier in the year to personally play William the songs and talk about the imagery, and when I started getting his Black Sheep Boy artwork in the mail I again modified the songs to fit what he’d drawn. The residue of my original idea of Black Sheep Boy action figures and comic books was that I still really wanted the art to feel closely related to the music and the lyrics.

Because the record had been sitting for so long in my brain before a note had been written or a word sung, it was really difficult for me to let go of Black Sheep Boy. It’s hard to remember, but I think there were at least four distinct mastering and re-mastering sessions, three different orders that I was sure would be the final order, a handful of songs that were almost cut from the record or almost included, and more song-title changes than anyone in the band cares to remember. We turned it in to the record company considerably past due because it was so hard for me to give it up. In a way, the record really was like my little boy, and though I knew he was the black sheep I wanted to make sure that his hair wasn’t too cowlicked and his shoes were double-knotted before I let him go out into the wild stupid world to run amok and to make me look bad, to pick on Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See and to earn the consternation of Down the River of Golden Dreams and to never write or call Sleep and Wake-Up Songs and to stay out all night causing trouble with a stray dog-eared copy of Stars Too Small to Use that I had tried to keep locked indoors.

_{The Story of Black Sheep Boy}

Minha música preferida do álbum (e uma das favoritas de todos os tempos) é a completamente bela em todos os seus 8 minutos So Come Back, I Am Waiting.

A black sheep boy revolves over canyons and waterfalls. A black sheep boy dissolves in syringe or in shower stall. He says “there’s plenty of time to make you mine tonight, there’s plenty of time to make you mine.” He says “there’s plenty of ways to know you’re not dying, all right. Hell, there’s plenty of light still left in your eyes.” A black sheep boy grows horns, breathing smoke through his microphone. The airwaves stretch and they groan, bleeding, birthing his black diapason. He says “there’s plenty of things to wear when you come to me, every color of sleeve to be rolled. There are millions of rolling eyes that still cling to me. Every language of king is concerned. So why did you bawl from the spell of some old holy song that some liar laughed as he composed - some liar I loved to control?” A black sheep boy dissolves in hot cream, in sweet moans, in each dead bed and empty home, in each seething bacterium. Killing softly and serial, he lifts his head, handsome, horned, magisterial. He's the smell of the moonlight wisteria. He’s the thrill of the abecedarian. (See the muddy hoofprints where he carried you?) And there’s plenty of ways to claim his crimes tonight, and there’s plenty of things to do on his dime. And there’s plenty of ways to wear his hide tonight. You’ve got yours and I’ve got mine. So why did you flee? Don’t you know you can’t leave his control, only call all his wild works your own? So come back and we’ll take them all on. So come back to your life on the lam. So come back to your old black sheep man. He says “I am waiting on hoof and on hand. I am waiting, all hated and damned. I am waiting - I snort and I stamp. I am waiting, you know that I am, calmly waiting to make you my lamb.”

Okkervil River
best of 2005

Apendicite

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 12:40:10 +0000

Eu devia fazer uma lista de melhores de 2005, mas eu tenho vergonha de admitir que estou perdido na minha coleção, não consigo mais lembrar qual foi aquela música foda daquela tal banda que eu ouvi ontem... é, tá feia a coisa. Se fosse fazer mesmo uma lista teria que pegar algumas prontas como base e ir limando - deixando os que eu lembro de ter gostado e tirando os outros.

Mas, de uma coisa eu lembro, Black Sheep Boy com certeza foi um dos melhores álbuns de 2005.

E o pior é que a minha lista ia ficar meio monótona também, porque eu seria obrigado a colocar esse disquinho maravilhoso que é o Black Sheep Boy Appendix...

Esse EPzinho foi lançado em novembro de 2005, uma pena, se tivesse sido em 2006 eu já deixava anotado para o topo de um improvável lista de melhores. E olha que o álbum é formado por "sobras" das gravações do "álbum-pai".

Ou seja, aqui você vai encontrar mais daquela atmosfera dark, estranha, amedontradora com uma luz no fundo do túnel. Vai continuar ouvindo a beleza do cantar poderoso de Will Sheff. E se deparar mais uma vez com arranjos incríveis e letras pertubadoras.

Okkervil River
best of 2005

E luxo so

Sat, 25 Feb 2006 18:49:03 +0000

Labradford, trio de Richmond, Virginia, formado pelo baixista Robert Donne, guitarrista/vocalista Mark Nelson, e Carter Brown nos teclados, lançou essa pequena gema em 1999: E luxo so.

A banda faz uma mistura de post-rock e ambient, instrumental competente e belas melodias.

Entretanto, eu quero falar mesmo é da tracklist que é das mais inusitadas e originais que eu já vi:

Legal, né? =D