We Can Tell How Good A Band Is Without Listening to Them! Probably not. But we’re going to try. Last Friday we blindly chose a band off of Last.FM’s “Hype List”. We will now judge (from 1 to 10) how good a band is based soley on their name and photo. After harsh (empty) judgment, today we’ll actually listen to their music to see how wrong/right we were.
(Joining us is L.A.-via-Milwaukee’s Adam Lovinus )
The Band We Are Judging Today:
Mercedes Sosa
And now… the moment of truth… feast your ears on THIS! (Last.Fm, MySpace)…
Brian: Well shit, now this experiment has made me feel like a fat, conceited American-centric jerk for not knowing what she’s saying, or who the hell she is. (Listening to “Mi Cajita de Music”). Very nice… a lovely slightly-hefty voice. Definitely 60s era folksy latin classical acoustic. I very much enjoyed those tracks, though, I won’t be guilted into giving her a 10 because I know nothing about the Argentinian Folk Tradition, or what the hell she’s saying. Final Rating: 8 (Previous Superficial Rating: 7)
Lille: I knew this had something to do with my grandmother. It’s exactly the kind of music I’d hear in her souped-up Lincoln. At first I wasn’t incredibly impressed by her songs, but I started listening to her whole catalog, and for some reason she reminds me of Leonard Cohen, but Argentinian and female. It’s perfect early morning listening; it transports me to a place that’s foreign, sad and beautiful at the same time. I googled her after listening to a couple of songs and found out she just died. I am humbled by the fact that Mercedes Sosa is not, in fact, a drain cleaner. And while I have an excuse not to like world music (I’m ethnic, give me a break), I think I would like to put this on my iPod in a playlist with the Buena Vista Social Club (heh). (Superficial Rating: n/a)
Adam: Indeed, she sounds as authentic as she looks. She’s NPR World Cafe all the way. The fine Spanish guitar work scores high on my nerd index. But it’s nothing I haven’t heard before, and it’s hard for me to get too excited about traditional music. As an unapologetic American, I can’t fully appreciate anything sung in a foreign language that’s not produced by Ry Cooder. My rating remains an 8. (Previous Superficial Rating:
And there you have it. We were relatively on-the-mark with this one.Tune in soon when we take on a much more terribly named artist.Oh, and if you’re curious (via Last.fm):
Mercedes Sosa (born 9 July 1935, died 3 October 2009 in Buenos Aires) was an Argentinean singer inmensely popular throughout Latin America. With her roots in argentineanfolk music, she became one of the preeminent exponents of nueva trova (new song). Sosa is greatly admired for the depth and beauty of her contralto voice. She is nicknamed “La Negra” by her fans for her long, jet-black hair.
The next time U2 comes to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to perform for 100,000 people and you have tickets 10 rows away from the stage, take note of my To-Do list and learn from my mistakes.
1. Wear comfy walking shoes THAT COVER YOUR TOES, and park downtown ($7 parking, y’all!). Then walk to the Rose Bowl.
2. Go to the bathroom before going in a tunnel. It will take you an hour to get to your seat ONCE YOU’RE INSIDE.
3. Bring a camera so you can take photos of David Beckham, Barbra Streisand, Mischa Barton, etc. in the audience milling about.
4. Also bring a camera so you can catch openers the Black Eyed Peas singing “Sweet Child o’ Mine” with Slash of Guns ‘n’ Roses. Except Fergie will sing the wrong words (”where do you go now…”) and you will cringe in your seat.
5. Expect to not hear songs you like and sit through parts of it.
6. Expect to marvel at the clarity of Bono’s voice and the Edge’s bell-like guitar tone. (All delay, all the time.)
7. Print out a photo of Burmese president Aung San Suu Kyi. Or a Tehran Radio poster. Or have your One membership card ready. Bono will quiz you on these topics while he is singing “A Beautiful Day.” And “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” It’s a long test.
8. Prepare to launch rocketships and cell phones into the air. Do not, like me, leave your cellphone in your car because you will need it for the obligatory, participative “cellphone-taking-place-of-lighter” moment at the end of the show.
9. When the band walks away from the stage, three feet away from you, DO NOT HESITATE TO HIGH FIVE THE BAND. Because they will high five back. BUT, if you hesitate and miss your chance, you will regret it forever. Or at least for the hour that you’re walking back to your really far away parking spot, cursing the fact that you’re wearing strapless Dopies and a sundress to an outdoor concert in October.
We Can Tell How Good A Band Is Without Listening to Them! Probably not. But we’re going to try. Last Friday we blindly chose a band off of Last.FM’s “Hype List”. We will now judge (from 1 to 10) how good a band is based soley on their name and photo. Tomorrow, we’ll actually listen to their music to see how wrong/right we were.
(Joining us is L.A.-via-Milwaukee’s Adam Lovinus )
The Band We Are Blindly Judging Today:
Mercedes Sosa
Alright, now we will look at a few pictures of the band….
(after seeing photos) Brian: Wow. I’m humbled. Not only is M.S. not a band, but an older lady who, apparently has been around forever based on the photos I looked at. It also appears she is playing one of those stand-up tambourine/drums. She may actually be an authentic latina folk singer! Good for her. My rating bumps up one to 8, because I respect my elders… and Spanish. Rating: 8 (7+1).
(after seeing photos) Lille: Well, she’s an old lady. And she could be mind-blowing like Manu Chao, or she could be boring, like most ethnic folk music that plays in my grandma’s Lincoln. Or, she could ACTUALLY be my grandma. Rating: ? (?+ possible genetic relationship).
(after seeing photos) Adam: Good heavens! She looks like Antony Hegarty. The uglier an artist is, the more authentic he/she/it seems to me. Typically. So this suggests she’s authentic-core <enter strain of Latin music here>. Good for plus-two. Rating: 7 (5+2).
On Wednesday, we will actually listen to her music, and update our opinions of mystery artist, Mercedes Sosa.
It occurs to everyone that listens to music… It happens when you’re scanning the paper to see what shows are going on, or when your you’re reading your nephew’s band’s liner notes:
You Can Tell How Good A Band Is Without Listening to Them! But is this true? We are here to test it out. We have blindly chosen three bands off of Last.FM’s “Hype List”. We will now judge (from 1 to 10) how good a band is based soley on their name. We will then look at their pictures, decide further if that changes our opinion. And then, finally, we’ll actually listen to their music to see how wrong/right we were.
(Joining us is L.A.-via-Milwaukee’s Adam Lovinus )
The Band We Will Be Blindly Judging Today:
Mercedes Sosa
Lille: There was a drain cleaner brand called Liquid Sosa that we used in college to clean our sinks instead of throwing garbage out. That’s what this band name reminds me of. Like a Mercedes Benz going down the drain. I get the impression that the lead singer of this band fell in love with a girl named Mercedes and stalked her outside her apartment for months and sent her paintings about the Iraq war. And that they play haunting goth music. Rating ?
Brian: The words “Mercedes” and “Sosa” immediately make me think of the douches that inhabit Wrigleyville. I get the impression that this band is either global-beat, or wants people to think they are ( a-la Brazilian Girls who are neither Brazilian, nor girls). I’m going to give them a 7. I’d like to support global beat music, if it turns out it’s five crackers doing slowcore on Moogs, I’ll be very disappointed. Rating: 7
Adam: Either a poppy, faux world-beat starlet a la Nelly Furtado, or a luxury automobile that runs on ethanol and steroids. The name-alone rating is a 5. Neither clever nor annoying.Rating: 5
On Monday, we will look at photos and update our increasingly superficial opinions of mystery band, Mercedes Sosa.
I’ve been listening to Wax Tailor all day today trying to figure out what his music sounds like, exactly. The French hip-hop & trip-hop producer/DJ Wax Tailor (aka Jean-Christophe Le Saoût) makes music with a touch of everything — jazz, hip/trip-hop, soul, even bebop. It’s like RJD2/Massive Attack meets Moloko/Dido/Portishead — all downtempo, smooth grooves. Adam says his music has a hint of Chess Records’ old-school sheen to it. Whatever it is, it’s pretty hooky, and worth checking out tomorrow at the Troubadour.
Wax Tailor is promoting his third album “IN THE MOOD FOR LIFE.” Here’s the audio album trailer so you can preview all the tracks from one MP3. Here’s a free download of the first single off the album “Say Yes (feat ASM)”. Watch out for a review of the show, too.
After reading about Lille and Araceli’s favorite love songs, I realized I was in trouble. Despite a healthy amount of loves, most of them fizzle before I have been properly introduced — failing to reach the apex of significant songwriting territory by a longshot. Not to be outdone, there are songs which I most-certainly attribute to romance, or, at least what I would interpret love to be in that particular era.
1992: Love is A Capella
I distinctly remember junior high gym dances being awkward in every way. Kids both obsessed and terrified of the opposite sex… and also sweaty from playing pick-up basketball in between dances. All I know is that slow-dances, complete with bad cologne and flat-bottom woven ties, were always made better by Boys II Men. Aside from that Motown/Philly gold, I was particularly fond of Shai’s “If I Ever Fall In Love “. I remember being outraged when I saw their video on MTV and it was the instrumental reprise! WTF. Acapella 4 Life, yo.
1997: Love is Swing-Techno-Ska
People do stuff for people they like. But, when you’re an impressionable teen, you don’t pretend to like stuff that a girl is interested in, you actually will yourself to like it. For real. This is the only reason I can come up with for me to dive headfirst into bands that included (but are not limited to) The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Underworld, and Less Than Jake… in the same year. Not that they were all terrible bands (I actually still like Underworld), but the only reason I can explain jumping from my favorite musicians in Junior High (Peter Gabriel’s US, and whatever was played on party radio B96) into Prodigy’s Fat of the Land would have to be girls.
2002: Love is a concept
Everything is difficult. The older people get, the more complicated they like to think life is. It’s like history class. When you’re 6, love is candygrams and the Civil War freed the slaves. When you’re 15, love is pure infatuation — ever-forgiving and evergreen — while the Civil War was the result of tension between the Industrial North and Agricultural South. When you’re older than 22 you have decided that the more you know, the more you’re aware of what you don’t know.
Love is all Conor Oberst talking about a mirror, or a girl (or a dream or something) and we are aware that the Civil War is called “The War of Northern Aggression” in the South, Northerners had no real interest in abolishing slavery, and Abe Lincoln temporarily disbanded congress and may or maynot have been bisexual. Here’s a song about Jeff Tweedy doing the dishes, or touring Japan, or drug addiction, or an aquarium.
To Recap: Drink Up Buttercup was fan-fucking-tastic. If you missed them on Saturday, you’ll have to catch them when they come back our way post-CMJ, though they’ll most certainly be filling a much larger venue than their Ronny’s gig last weekend.
It was stellar. A loose, pop-inflected, bedraggled, harmonious cacophony of a show. If there was ever a band that exemplified the need for universal health care, it’s D.U.B.. They’re erratic, they’re thrashing, they self-affectedly fall all over each other, they dispose of their instruments by dropping them on the floor, and the quartet (who all quit their jobs to tour) will almost certainly injure each other eventually. Obama! We need a public option!
My pal Pegs took some swell photos. One of which is above, a few more below. You get the idea.
So, obviously, I missed the show and wasn’t able to get tickets, even though I had five people simultaneously working Ticketweb at that time. Here’s the next best thing: NEW SONGS!!!
Energetic, shambling, playful, endearingly sloppy; these are things that immediately hit you when listening to Philly’s Drink Up Buttercup. Allegedly, their live show embodies these very same qualities, and you can see them (at eye level no-less) at the stageless Ronny’s this Saturday, October 3rd.
In a fuzzy fracas of keyboards, ghostly harmony, tempo-shifts, and Brit-invasion guitar they immediately call to mind your typical archetypes of these qualities — namely Clinic, Grizzly Bear, Fiery Furnaces, yada yada yada.
But unlike all the bands mentioned above, there are no self-serious tendencies to be found; they’re just too giddy to be so heavy (much less wear surgical masks). Even when they get their stompin’ march on it sounds closer to the clumsy grandeur of a K Records Modest Mouse than the doom & gloom of a Kurt Weill.
That said, listing possible influences is only fun for the one writing them, so it’s best to check them out live… ya know… tomorrow. And, maybe, in the meantime, enjoy these two tracks:
We Can Tell How Good A Band Is Without Listening to Them!
