The Vinyl Polis

Okay, so I don’t want a lot of television, but one show I’ll definitely watch if I happen to catch it is Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations at the Travel Channel.  I just love his personality.  He says fuck a lot, smokes like a chimney, drinks like he’s Irish, and has an everything-goes adventurous spirit about him.  All that, and he absolutely detests karaoke, which is probably a smart rule for one to have.

I was flipping through his website the other day looking for anything Tony might have to offer about Amsterdam, and found a video two brothers had made trying to get Tony to do an episode in Holland.  And OH MAN are these brothers hot.  Enjoy!

Asterisks, as Kurt Vonnegut suggested, might very well be more visually disturbing than the letters that conjoin as “a-s-s-h-o-l-e.” But our concern today is with what asterisks obscure, the choices they blot out, not what they themselves resemble. At first blush, it seems that Fucked Up’s unprintable name is doing its own excellent music a disservice. The pragmatist wonders: Does a band with this profane a name even hope to be successful?

More gems from the minds of mad musicians at LP Cover Lover.

Celine Dion is responsible for the world’s worst cover version, a poll of music experts has decided.

The Canadian star’s rendition of the AC/DC track ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ was given the dubious honour in the Total Guitar magazine survey.

Editor Stephen Lawson said Dion’s cover was “sacrilege”.

The bronze syringe bulb, which weighs 800 pounds and is held by three angels, was unveiled at the Mashuk-Akva Term spa, the spa’s director said Thursday.

“There is no kitsch or obscenity, it is a successful work of art,” Alexander Kharchenko told The Associated Press. “An enema is almost a symbol of our region.”

Russian Spa Opens Monument To The Enema, via wet/dry

Pitchfork reports the Brazilian Girls are set to release their third LP, entitled New York City, 5 August of this year, just three days after they rock Chicago at Lollapalooza.

As I was pretty disappointed with the last album, following the incredible Brazilian Girls in 2005, I hope this new release will be more innovative, and shy away from the rushed/crunchy/punk sound of Talk To La Bomb.  Sabina Sciubba is one foxy band leader, but, man, she wasn’t getting away with just her sass last time.  From the Pitchfork article, it seems the group have been getting some great outside help:

Due August 5 from Verve Forecast, the set features legendary Senegalese singer Baaba Maal on “Internacional”, plus jazz percussionist Kenny Wollesen and his Himalayas on a trio of tracks.

David Browne for this week’s Rolling Stone (RS 1054) writes about the return of vinyl as a desirable (and, increasingly, profitable) medium for listening to music both old and new.  According to the article ‘Vinyl Returns in the Age of MP3‘, the groovy format has jumped 15 per cent in sales from 2006 to 2007, and could double in sales to 1.6 million pressings retailed by the end of 2008.  Recently spurred by creative marketing strategies (Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows in special discbox pushed 13,000 copies, Elvis Costello’s April release of Momofuku was available only on LP for the first few weeks), people realizing how shitty MP3s actually sound, and a good bit of nostalgia, vinyl is staging a definitive comeback.

I can certainly agree.  This past year I purchased at least ten copies of both favorite albums and new releases on vinyl.  The sound is irreplaceable, even compared to ripping CDs with Apple Lossless or AIFF.  Plus, I really enjoy listening to entire albums; I love the ritual associated with appreciating album art, taking the time to set the needle and turn the disc, as well as appreciating the warmth vinyl innately brings to the house.  That, and I can empathize with Browne’s state of mind:

There’s also something less technical lurking behind vinyl’s mini-renaissance.  Whether it’s inspecting a needle for dust or flipping the record over at the end of a side, LPs demand attention.  And for a small but growing group, those demands aren’t a nuisance.  “There’s nothing like putting the needle into the groove of a record,” says country singer Shelby Lynne.  “it’s about as real as you can get.  You got your vinyl, your weed, your friends, and while you’re rollin’ they’re pickin’ out another record.  We’re all taking music for granted because it’s so easy to push a button.  I mean, come on, music should be fun.”

I just found out this morning I was accepted to the Cultural Analysis research master’s program at the Universiteit van Amsterdam!  It’s been two years since I was last in Amsterdam, and I’ve been trying to get back there ever since; now I’ll be living there for the next two years!

So what is Cultural Analysis and why the heck am I going to the Netherlands for grad school?  Well the program is an incredibly interdisciplinary adventure that studies and creates inquiries into several phenomena surrounding the production and circulation of contemporary culture using objects and artifacts (in the broadest sense) as a point of departure.  More specifically, the faculty encourages students to

analyze cultural phenomena - such as social systems of belief and value, works of art and literature, film and the new media - and their conceptual underpinnings as well as their aesthetic and social-material structures. We emphasize textual, visual and historical details and also the implied normativity and the ways in which identity, difference and otherness are negotiated across the various media. Keep reading →

After the outstandingly terrible 2005 release of Odditorium Or Warlords of Mars, The Dandy Warhols have stepped up, re-energized, and now have a new album available entitled …Earth To The Dandy Warhols… (stream the entire album here). This time, the Portland, OR based band have abandoned the dilapidated subterranean haze their sound recently encompassed, and reconfigured themselves once again for the best album they’ve put out since 2000’s amazing Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia. This is the first release with their new label Beat The World Records, and I really think this one will take off. Maybe it’s just the brazen attitude and androgyny of lead singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor, but when I listen to the Dandys I get a strange yet comfortable sense of being groped. That, in tandem with the large soundscapes their albums cover (Dandys Rule and Thirteen Tales, specifically), make for totally pleasurable listening experiences. Keep reading →