Today was a rather long and cruel one. It was very hard to focus on work, though I did complete several tasks that needed to be done. Concentration has not been easy for the past few days. In fact, it became a lot harder yesterday after my long day of solo travel down to San Diego for drinking. To be honest, I was starting to feel hungover by 10:00pm last night. Shit, I wound up playing poker with Landon and Nate when I got home and I was making a lot of brainless decisions. I just missed the final table in the last of three tournaments I played. I could have won a whopping $3.00! Good thing I earned a quick $0.50 for knocking another player out of the tournament. All told, I only lost $9.40 last night. What is that, two shitty beers at an Echo Park bar? Who gives a shit?
Last week’s top ten list centered around the impending time I’m going to be spending away from my girlfriend. I laid out a map for how exactly I should spend my time while she is out of town. During the first five days, I’ve accomplished three of the ten goals: poker, drinking, and day trips. Hell, I did all three yesterday! Not bad for a first week. Next week I think the new softball season begins, and also Tom is back so the LOST re-watch can continue. Yup…things are beginning to look up. A weekend visit from my mother in seven days will be a welcome vacation from the non-stop thoughts rattling around in my brain.
Things around these parts are going to be a bit quiet this weekend, but I have a scout in New York this weekend to report on and photograph the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival. He asked if there were any acts that were “must-see,” so I told him Autolux, Grouper, Jesus Lizard, Shellac, and Boris performing Feedbacker. I could care less about most of the other acts, especially the headliners. In fact, here’s the ten people I’d least like to watch if I were to attend the festival this weekend.
The Top Then Must-Miss Bands At All Tomorrow’s Parties New York 2009
10. Iron & Wine – If there’s any genre of music less conducive to a big festival, it’s a bushy-bearded Southerner singing his mope-rock ballads. He’ll probably drag his sister along for those “cute” harmonies his songs contain, but it won’t help us forget that the songs themselves are as forgettable as a shitty drunken lay. $5 says he wears a vintage baseball cap on stage.
09. Panda Bear – Who the fuck is Panda Bear, and why the fuck should I give a shit. He’s some relative to Animal Collective, right? Well, Animal Collective sucks, so the chances that Panda Bear is any more bearable are as slim as the odds any of the nerds at ATP will get laid this weekend. I guess that’s why they book so many lame acts — no one’s going to hook up so they have a lot of time to fill and a lot of people to keep occupied. Is this supposed to be “difficult” music? One dude making avant sounds? I don’t care enough to find out. Its a stupid name, anyway.
08. Black Moth Super Rainbow – Thanks a lot Devendra Banhart, for introducing a generation of music fans to watered down bullshit psychedelic folk electronic. I don’t think these guys would even be good on mushrooms. They’re more likely to incite drugged-up riots and people slitting their throats just to stop that awful racket. The band name makes me think of a cool blown-out Japanese experimental band, but all the pictures of see of these dufuses remind me of Echo Park bars. Why?
07. Caribou With Vibration Ensemble – Oh, you mean another solo guy composing dreamy, noisy psychedelic electronic music? Yeah, that sounds like exactly what we need more of at rock shows…some guy staring at a laptop while Pitchfork photographers cream their jeans. I bet the Vibration Ensemble will not even be discernible over the dreck of Caribou. Boo!
06. EL-P – Because a concert catered towards a vastly white audience can’t not have an African American representative on the bill, the folks at ATP have settled for El-P, an alternative hip hop artist from Brooklyn. Again, the thought of an alternative hip hop artist from Brooklyn fills me with douche chills. No, wait, maybe that’s just the swine-flu/anxiety attack I’ve been suffering from all day. It’s making me extra cranky because I can’t figure out whether I’m just a nervous wreck or actually ill.
05. No Age WIth Bob Mould – Is there a more overrated band than No Age? I mean, they’re like the Interpol of this year, right? They put out one album, made “different” sounds that are really just carbon copies of plenty of older, better acts. Playing Husker Du with Bob Mould should be hilarious, as for the last few years I can’t stop listening to his voice and thinking about Tom Hanks. Trust me. Put on Warehouse: Songs And Stories, then tell me Mould doesn’t sound just like Tom Hanks yelling at the top of his lungs. If you need a visual aid, feel free to do a Google image search for Tom Hanks pictures.
04. Deerhunter / Atlas Sound – That guy is both of these bands, right? The tall, lanky dork? I’ve seen him at some shows around LA and he always look like a punch in the face waiting to happen. I think he blogs, too. There was some controversy about him accidentally putting a link on his blog to something he shouldn’t have, and then the loser made a bunch of webcam videos apologizing for what he did. In other words, the guy has way too much time on his hands, so he really doesn’t have the ability to craft…you know…decent songs. I don’t know…I’ve heard his music and can’t find anything interesting about it, and looking like a fey piece of certainly shit isn’t going to help me find anything worth appreciating in his artwork.
03. Animal Collective – All the kids these days love Animal Collective. I’ve never quite figured out why, as simply having a large audience is most assuredly not concrete evidence that a band is GOOD. That said, the music is boring, at times downright unlistenable. You can prattle on for five or six minutes at a time without changing anything and still sound good (see: Neu!, The Fall, et al), but it’s way easier to make your songs sound like fucking torture when you add in all those goofy, superficial bits and pieces of ideas that are supposed to make a song sounds artsy or cool. How can something be both lo-fi pop and gorgeous, textural and unique? Fuck Animal Collective and their braindead fans.
02. The Flaming Lips – If I wanted to see Flaming Lips perform this weekend, I could have seen them any number of times this decade, as they have been performing the exact same songs ever since 2002. Wayne Coyne is a pernicious force in the world of independent music, and his ability to epically fail at curating a music festival is further proof that he’s probably retarded. Wayne Coyne is what happens when a slightly talented, older band suddenly gains widespread mainstream success. They become to the music world what Gwenyth Paltrow is to Hollywood, a dumb cunt with a point of view that is as wrong as it is unnecessary.
01. Sufjan Stevens – The big news last week was that auditory macaroni artist and part-time child-toucher Sufjan Stevens decided to play his album Seven Swans in its entirety at All Tomorrow’s Parties. This made, uh…nobody excited, as watching a complete loser jackass in a stupid costume finger his banjo for an hour is about as engaging as a complete loser jackass in a stupid costume finger his own asshole for an hour. I instructed my man-on-the-scene to mercilessly heckle Stevens, but I doubt that will happen. I would really like for somebody reading this to yell out between songs, “How much longer until your Wyoming album is released!?” or, “Daniel Smith did it first!” In the end, I’m sure all the usual suspects in the music blog universe or online ‘zine universe will call it revelatory. The words “powerful,” “sparse” and “beautiful” will most certainly appear in any text written about his performance.
David Axlerof – The Smile
Expo ’70 – Empyreal Totem
Parson Sound – Milano
Twink – Suicide [Demo]
