State of The Union: Music Edition

I like modern folk. I like music that’s inspired by bluegrass and old school country music. I like acoustic guitars, banjos, upright bass, and bass drums. I like what happens when formerly folky bands go electric and start exploring different spaces. I like a few songs and bands coming out of the current electronic/synth movement, but in general it’s not my thing. I like disposable pop songs in addition to classics that will never die - but only a few of both.

I like funk, I like soul. I like comebacks. I like old live albums by James Brown and Ike and Tina Turner. I like that sometimes an album sits in my iTunes for a year and suddenly I discover it for the first time. I like that sometimes you outgrow a band and sometimes a band outgrows you.

I like bands that work hard on stage. I like going to concerts, but I don’t usually like other people who go to concerts. I like bands that create a good vibe in a room and causes everybody to love each other. I don’t mind getting bumped by your elbow while you’re dancing, but if you keep doing it I’m going to push you down a flight of stairs.

I like local bands and I like following bands that not everybody knows about - but sometimes that turns you into a music elitist - which is silly because elitists are just people who listen to whatever Pitchfork tells them to. So like what you like and don’t turn your nose up at other people’s taste - unless you have a friend that goes to every Dave Matthews concert ever, in which case, you can tease him about it in a good natured way that says, “I’m making fun of you, but I know in a few years one of my favorite bands will be the new Dave Matthews and I’ll have some hard decisions to make.”

I like slow builds, and swells, and crescendos. I like crunchy guitars. I like bands that jam but aren’t jam bands. I hate endless noodling.

I hate rock stars but I love rock bands.

Lyrics are important. The only people who say they don’t listen to lyrics are kids who don’t want their parents to take away their rap albums. I like songs about redemption, forgiveness, and reclaiming your soul. Oddly enough, in spite of this, I don’t really like Christian music. I also like songs about girls that might not have been written about your girl but that you can pretend are about your girl.

I like songs with occasional screaming and/or talking in the background.

That’s the state of the union, music edition, for Patrick Drury, 37 years in.

Mumford and Sons

Getting a chance to really work through the entire album. I love it. I think any album benefits from a nice, expensive set of headphones, but this one… there’s so much texture and power there in the cans. You really miss a lot if you’re just listening to it on regular speakers. That being said, here’s a couple of their videos. One has dirty words, so don’t let your mom hear it.

5 Things I love

Once again, taking inspiration from Promise Tangeman, here are 5 things I love:

Pulp covers
They’re weird, they’re sleazy, and they suggest all kinds of sordid stories with just one picture. I’ve never actually read a pulp - and my guess is that I’d be disappointed if I did, so for now, I’ll just stick with the covers.

Videocopilot.net
There are a lot of sites out there dedicated to After Effects tutorials, but the most stylish and entertaining of them all has to be Andrew Kramer’s Video Copilot. It and Matt Fraction’s advice to “%$#@ around as much as possible” have helped me more than anything with the software. Of course the problems with tutorials is that there’s a temptation to rip them off completely (which I’ve done a couple of times…), but Kramer always encourages people to take what he teaches and build on it.

Siege - Marvel Comics 4 issue limited series
I not a huge fan of all the event storytelling taking place at Marvel these days - but man, Siege has knocked it out of the park so far. Bendis is writing an action packed story that gets my childhood favorites, The Avengers, back together and it’s being drawn by Olivier Coipel - one of the best artist working in the biz today. Only two issues in and I’m already in love.

Love, Power, Peace - James Brown Live at the Olympia, Paris , 1971
I saw the aforementioned Matt Fraction recommend this album twice so I finally checked it out. From now on, live is the only way to listen to James Brown to my mind.

iPod Nano
I got my iPod stolen a month or so ago. I replaced it with a 16 gig Nano. That’s quite a bit less storage than I had before, but that’s actually turned out to be a good thing. It’s made me invest myself a lot more into what music I put on the thing - and it’s much smaller footprint has me carrying it everywhere. It’s really kind of invigorated my music-listening. It also has a video camera that I’ve never used and a pedometer which I assume tells you how many child molesters are in your area.

There you go. Five things I love.

All You Need Is Wu Tang

One of my guilty pleasures is that I love a good mash-up. My favorite ever is DJ Danger Mouse’s mash-up of the Beatles White album with Jay Z’s Black album to create… wait for it… the Grey album. If you don’t have it or can’t find it, let me know. I’ll give it to you. It’s totally worth having.

With this love in mind, imagine my excitement to find out about the new Wu Tang/Beatles mash-up, Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers.

Just started listening to it. You can download it here! If you download it, keep in mind: Wu Tang = dirty words!

Snobbery

Ten years ago I was kind of a douche about comic books. I had decided, thanks to various voices on the internet, that super hero had choked all the potential out of the medium. It was a popular opinion on certain websites, and not altogether untrue. So I put away the majority of super hero comics and only read indie stuff; crime stories, slice of life stuff, auto-biographies. I discovered a lot of great comics during that phase; unfortunately, it was at the cost of some good super hero comics, no doubt.

Super heroes do indeed have a peculiar choke hold on the comics industry and recognizing that, in and of itself, isn’t particularly douchey. It was my looking down my nose at the capes and super-powers set that strikes me now as unnecessarily snobby.

I’ve done the same thing with music. I’ve scoffed at mainstream, popular music and felt a smug sense of self-satisfaction over the fact that my favorite bands would never be heard on most radio stations. I’ve even professed to like bands that I knew were popular even though, in my heart of hearts, I didn’t like their music. Like Sigor Ros. I know they’re a talented band. I know their fans are hard won and by no means indicative of the attitude I’m discussing here. I simply never could get into them. But when asked? “Oh yeah, love ‘em.”

So, I’m trying to get past that kind of thing. For one thing, as I said above, it’s a douchey attitude. It’s also, I’m sure rooted in vanity or, more likely, insecurity. Those aren’t things I want to drive my personality.

I was recently accused of hating everything until it proves to me that it’s worthy of my affection. There’s probably some truth to that, bad as it sounds. I was also recently accused of only liking something until it becomes popular and then suddenly hating it. I don’t want there to be any truth to that. If something is good it should be good whether 5 people like it, or 5 million.

So here’s to saying goodbye to comic book and music snobbery and being open to whatever’s out there. It’s not that my taste is changing, it’s just that I’m going to be more concerned with what I actually like instead of what some people think I should like.

Luckily when it comes to movies and television I’ve always watched crap, so no change there.

Wahoo!

SUNDAY VALLEY to play GREEN LANTERN on Dec. 26th! 10 PM!

On David Bazan and cursing branches

I really like David Bazan. Somehow, I totally missed out on his band Pedro The Lion in spite of my one-time housemate, Kup, being really into them. Bazan’s solo career has been a real joy for me, though. The EP he released a few years ago still gets a lot of iPod time from me. So I was really excited when the Colonel mentioned he had a new album out.

Curse Your Branches, the new album, was a real challenge for me to listen to. Musically, it’s perfection. It features all of the things I found so charming about the EP with possibly a bit more polish. Thematically, though, the album was hard to digest. In truth, I’m still kind of digesting it.

Curse Your Branches is all about Bazan losing his faith. From the first song to the last Bazan is laying out a case for why he can no longer believe the things he once did (and that his parents and wife still do believe). As a person of faith it’s tough to listen to. Not because I object to someone being honest about that sort of thing - on the contrary, I think the album is extremely brave and I admire his willingness to live out this kind of thing in front of his fans - many of which, no doubt, are believers.

It’s tough for me to listen to because I think the things Bazan is wresting with are the things most thinking Christians wrestle with. He did battle with the quiet doubts we all face and came to a conclusion most of us don’t really like to imagine. And while people come to the conclusions that Bazan has come to every day, there’s a real underlying sadness to the picture Bazan paints of his journey - specifically as it relates to his family and his interaction with them around the topic. And I realize that’s probably me projecting how I’d feel onto him. He, for all I know, may be completely comfortable with the whole thing.

I’ve read several interview with Bazan since getting the album. Bazan obviously tells his story much better than I can in a short blog post from my side of the glass. I encourage you to give the album a listen and then track down some of his own words on the topic. It may not exactly be edifying to your faith, but I don’t think it’s wrong to listen when somebody takes the time to express their struggle. God bless David Bazan.

why i like matt fraction

Because he puts Mountain Goats’ lyrics in issues of Iron Man.