Archive for April, 2008
Sorry, folks, I suck.
April 26th, 2008
No Friday Fivehead this week. It’s the end of the semester at good ol’ Penn State Fayette and you know what that means, right? A thousand damned final papers to grade, plus a lot of pointless running around and all that kind of crap. *Shrug* It happens. At least I’m getting paid to do it!
Unfortunately, I’m not getting paid to put together the Friday Fivehead, so I’ve had to put it on the backburner this week just so I can get caught up with all my freakin’ schoolwork. Next week is the last week of classes, however, and all final papers will have been graded and returned to students by then, so don’t worry: you’ll get your Fivehead fix next week or my name isn’t Jeremiah P. Muxtlethwaite.
There is only one thing that’s going to get me through this enbd-of-semester blitz. DISCO. Lots and lots of disco. So expect next Friday’s Fivehead to be a disco extravaganza! You might want to go looking for your wing-collared polyester shirts and your afro wigs right now to get ready. Also, you may want to watch Dolemite and Saturday Night Fever, too.
“City of Pillars” Chapter 6 now in theatres! Shown in Sense-O-Rama!
April 23rd, 2008
Just like the title says: The long-awaited (since last week) sixth chapter of “City of Pillars” hath been posted on Footnotes to the Human Species.
But some of you may still be skeptical. “Do I really want to read about giant betentacled transdimensional monsters destroying a city? I mean, you’re clearly ripping off Cloverfield, Pegritz—that’s sooooo obvious.” Well, yeah, I am. Unabashedly. But here, why don’t you read this and then tell me what you think:
I don’t know how many times I almost fell. Wainwright wasn’t a real big guy, but he was still wearing most of his gear, and I had him over my right shoulder, so I kept leaning right. Muroni’s jumping down the stairs like he’s a fucking kangaroo and Kelly’s neck-and-neck him. “Wait for me!” I yelled again and again but they didn’t even here. I wasn’t even paying attention to the floor numbers, I was just running, jumping, practically falling down the stairs just like this paramedics we’d seen coming down in Stairwell B who’d said there was something up on 36.
We were outpacing the thing—we were actually getting ahead of it!—and I was, like, We’re gonna make it, we’re gonna outrun the Thing From Another World and then we ran into another unit coming up—I mean, we literally ran into them.
No one could see each other in the smoke. These guys must’ve been coming up the stairwell dragging hoses behind them to put out individual floor fires. Next thing you know there’s a pile-up and I’m falling facefirst down the stairs in a big crush of bodies and screaming and water—somebody had pulled the valve on the hose. I dropped Wainwright. I don’t even know where he went—I just fell. I hit the landing so hard my forehead cracked off the tiles and oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph, the pain blacked me out for a couple of seconds.
And then I came back to myself. I heard men screaming like girls and the guy lying next to me just flew up into the air; those worm-things had bit into him and just yanked him straight up. I looked up and oh, my God, the entire stairwell was…there was a ceiling of thing, and it was reaching down with worms and now these long, jointed bony hooks, picking up men and just stuffing them into itself. My mind went blank then and I got up and I ran; shoving past any body in my way, grabbing men and pushing everyone out of my way, fuckin’ throwing them down the stairs. Another guy beside me screamed and shot up into the air and that was it—no way was I going out like that. That was the point that I lost my mind like Wainwright had. I barely remember what I was doing. Shoved anyone out of my way, just kept going down, stiff-arming my way through that bottleneck in the stairwell like I was Jerome Fucking Bettis.
Chapter 6 is told from the point of view of one Rudy LaCava, an FDNY fireman who runs into some pretty awful things in the North Tower and narrowly misses dying in the collapse…only to discover that the worst is yet to come.
The Friday Fivehead: Juno Reactor, Vangelis, Laki Mera, Tim O’Reagan, and Thomas Dolby
April 17th, 2008
Jesus F. Chrizzist…it’s Friday again?! I remember back in the day, when I was in highschool, it seemed like the temporal distance from one weekend to the next was something on the order of weeks—but now that I am an “adult” (or at least pretending to be one during the day), a week can vanish in an eyeblink. Contrary to what most physicists believe, I think the Universe is actually shrinking, the speed of light growing faster, and time itself speeding up. It’s either that or I accidentally took too many muscle-relaxers for my messed-up shoulder….
OK, anyway—Friday it is, and that means it’s Friday Fivehead time yet again. Yes, again? Will it ever stop? I don’t know. Turn off the lights, and I glow…I glow with cancer-causing alpha radiation, because this week I’m bringing you a whole host of jams so full of light and power they have to be radioactive. We’ve got Juno Reactor’s latest, an awesome 3-disc reissue of one of Vangelis’ most influential works, some eerie trip-hop from Laki Mera, Tim O’Reagan from the Jayhawks beautiful and sad solo album, and LIVE Thomas Dolby from his recent Soul Inhabitant tour! So, without further ado (that is, any more prefatory bullshit), let’s get to the music:
Juno Reactor is often thought of as a “techno” band—a band that makes electronic dance music. Yes, they certainly do make electronic dance music that is perfect for all manner of club nights…but, much like Banco de Gaia, Juno Reactor makes a lot more than just dance music. In fact, their latest album, Gods & Monsters, has only one single track on it, the opener, “Inca Steppa”, that is clearly aimed at club play. Most of the songs on this album are deep, dubby, downtempo numbers that feature dense mixtures of lovely vocals, electronics, and live percussion. “Tokyo Dub” has one of the most ominous bass lines I’ve ever in any piece of music short of Ennio Morricone’s theme to John Carpenter’s The Thing, and the eerie thereminh-like synths really make this a song suitable for darkened bars in The Sprawl (you Gibson freaks know where I’m coming from). “Mind of the Free” is a lovely ambient piece carried by a delicate-as-aerogel piano line and shivery, subdued percussion—but the album’s most glorious standout tracks are clearly “Immaculate Crucifixion”, with its gorgeous backwards synth-line, ominous strings, and driving live percussion; and “Pretty Girl”, a song featuring such gorgeous deep, soulful vocals that almost sounds like a country song from the 1970s (something by Willie Nelson, perhaps) remixed with a light techno backbeat and some synthpop touches. This is truly a groundbreaking album for a band whose been around for a long time but still shows it has the ability to grow and try out new things.
And now, let me ask you a question? Have you seen Blade Runner? If yes, continue. If not…where the hell have you been living?! Under a mountain? Go RIGHT NOW to the nearest DVD store/Amazon.com/wherever you need to go and watch it—preferably the “Final Version.” In fact, thanks to the release of that “Final Version”, Polydor is finally releasing the complete soundtrack of the film by legendary Greek synthesist/composer Vangelis. This 3-disc
“25 Anniversary” edition contains all of the music Vangelis wrote for the film. The music is very eerie, spare, and yet extremely lush thanks to Vangelis’ use of wordless vocal solos and gentle synth pads that combine to create a surprisingly beautiful soundscape to complement a very dark and moody film. Oh, that darkness and moodiness comes through in certain pieces, such as “Blush Response” and “Tales of the Future (vocoded)”—but for the most part, Vangelis’ soundtrack to Blade Runner is an amazing example of that particular late-’70s/early-’80s “space music” that even today still sound futuristic and progressive. I’ve always found Vangelis’ work to be rather uneven—his famous theme to Chariots of Fire is pure synthy schmaltz—but there is not a single moment, not a single note, on the Blade Runner soundtrack that isn’t entirely brilliant. The assorted samples from Blade Runner that occasionally lace through the music are wonderful too at setting themes and moods. This album is a wonderfully relaxing tour through a future still to come, and if you’re not feeling like a replicant by the end of it, then you might actually be a replicant.
Speaking of dark, moody futures, Laki Mera’s debut album Clutter could very well be the soundtrack to Blade Runner 2. A few weeks ago, I panned Portishead’s “comeback” album Third for being poorly-produced and badly-composed. Just yesterday, in fact, I quoted Salon.com’s equally-bad review of the album—but I strongly disagree with their reviewer on whether or not trip-hop is “dead.” It most certainly is not, and Laki Mera prove that it isn’t. Clutter is what Third should have been: a dark, sexy, slinky collection of tunes defined by groovy drums, dirty basslines, synths like cool waves of silk undulating in a chilly breeze, and airy vocals that glide over the music like dandelion seeds floating through the aether. Ethereal is a very good term to use for Laki Mera’s music. It doesn’t sound like is comes from earth. There’s a deep-sky, alien sort of sound to it, as if a bunch of replicants tired and bitter and exhausted after fighting on the Orion Line have formed a band to give musical expression to their weary, human-like lives. Though vocalist Laura Donnelly sings of earthly matters such as emotional ennui (”Signals”) or angry sadness (”How Dare You”), she sounds as though she’s singing about them having learned them from some lonely human outcast exiled to a deep-space outpost. If you like your music emotional and yet strangely alien at the same time, then dear gods, Laki Mera will be your new favorite band.
Coming back to Earth, Tim O’Reagan from The Jayhawks has released a self-titled solo album that is absolutely brilliant. As much as I love futuristic music made by robots, there’ll always be a huge soft-spot in my all-too-human heart for touching, emotion-laden alt-country/American roots music like The Jayhawks, The Pernice Brothers, and so on. There’s something uniquely beautiful about a sad, soul-searching country song with a dancy ol’ beat, acoustic guitar strumming, and tears-in-your-beer lyrics that speak directly to the part of your soul where all the might-have-beens and relationship disasters have left their keepsakes. O’Reagan’s voice is simply beautiful, and his music, which is so perfectly recorded and mixed you can hear every single syllable clear as crystal as well as every single low and high note on the pianos, every steel guitar twang, and every cymbal stroke. “River Bends” is a heart-wrenching number about—hell, what else?—screwed-up love, and as long as I live it will always be connected to the young lady whom I loved so dearly during my short time at Waynesburg College. (She turned out to be a vengeful, vicious cunt, but hey…when times were good, they were glorious. I don’t think I was ever so happy.) That’s the magic of good, melodic alt-country: it connects with you on an emotional level, and seems uniquely suited to drawing forth the poison from your soul even as it makes you feel that anguish all over again. And I haven’t heard an alt-country album as sweetly cathartic as Tim O’Reagan’s solo debut in ages.
*Le sigh*
And finally, to end on an upbeat note, do I even have to say that Thomas Dolby ROCKS BEYOND BELIEF?! When I was wee, I adored “She Blinded Me With Science” and every single song from his debut album, The Golden Age of Wireless. I honestly never thought I’d get the chance to see Thomas Dolby live, though—but I should’ve known: I’ve seen Gary Numan, Devo, A Flock of Seagulls, Wang Chung…sooner or later it was inevitable that I see Thomas Dolby live. And guess what? Last year, Dolby went on tour solo, performing a nice selection of his work (yes, including “She Blinded Me With Science”) entirely himself. I saw him twice on this tour, and, my gods, it was exquisite. Dolby had reconstructed a number of his tunes as pure synthpop gems that he performed entirely himself, triggering various tracks and instruments LIVE with a Korg MIDI pad, a bank of synthesizers, and even an oldskool analog tone generator that looks like something he’d salvaged from the trash at Bletchley Park circa 1973. At the second show, he had a recording of his solo live act available, and now it’s available on Amazon.com as well! All Dolby fans who unfortunately missed him on tour must go there immediately and buy this album. The new live versions of “One of Our Submarines”, “Flying North”, “Airhead”, and (my personal favorite) “Living in a Suitcase” are honestly superior to their album equivalents. Years of practice and new technology have done wonders for Dolby’s timeless songs, and they sound fresher than ever now. If “Flying North” doesn’t make you want to just transform into an advanced jet fighter and blast off for the stratosphere, then you are clearly not a Transformer. Or something. Just get it—it’s pitch-perfect synthpop, and if you read this blog, you probably like that kind of stuff!
And that’s it for another Friday Fivehead, you friggin’ weirdos. So go forth, get some great music, and rock it out. I’ll catch y’all next week with an even more eclectic sampling of jams, including the new B-52s album! Wonder how Fred Schneider’s intense gayness has held up over the past years….Well, only one way to find out! Stay tuned.
Technorati Tags: juno reactor,gods & monsters,vangelis,blade runner,laki mera,clutter,tim o’reagan,jayhawks,thomas dolby,sole inhabitant,music,review,electronic,new age,soundtrack,synthpop,trip-hop,alt-country
The Third Nail in Trip-Hop’s Coffin?
April 17th, 2008
Salon.com has an interesting review of Portishead’s uneven, disappointing, and…oh, hell, let’s just call it what it is—shitty—Third album and the “death” of trip-hop. Mind you, I find trip-hop to be alive and better than well in the form of artists such as Little Dragon, Jade, Laki Mera, and even Juno Reactor (yes, their latest album Gods and Monsters is surprisingly downtempo and moody, as you will see in tomorrow’s Friday Fivehead), but I think this excerpt from the review of the album itself prettymuch sums up the album’s main failure point perfectly:
Gibbons’ lyrics used to suggest an assertive, liberated attitude. She closed out “Dummy” demanding a reason to be a woman; on “Elysium,” from “Portishead,” she insists, “You can’t deny how I feel/ And you can’t decide for me!” On “Third,” however, she treats her indecisiveness like a torment on the level of psychosis — a one-dimensional, even stereotypical, view of womanhood as equivocal and weak. “I’m always so unsure!” she laments on the album’s dismal closer, “Threads,” like someone about to throw herself off a bridge because she cannot afford a life coach.
Now, here’s the thing: I like dreary, dismal music. I’m a horror writer by night, and a weekend Goth, for the Other Gods’ sake: dark, dismal, depressing music is part of the soundtrack of my life. But that’s not what I want from Portishead. From Soul Whirling Somewhere, Lachrymosa, Sopor Aeturnus, yes…but not from the band that brought back the “James Bond” sound and slathered it with a new, slinky hip-hop vibe. Alas. How the mighty have fallen.
ME, Two? The Sins of Windows Vista
April 16th, 2008
One year ago today I was happily using Windows Vista. I had even written a few times on this very blog hyar that all the alarmist bullshit being flung around about how Vista eats up all your computer’s resources and is so full of DRM it won’t even let you play a CD unless you have a signed and notarized affidavit from the copyright holder was all just that: bullshit. Last year at this time, the only problems I was running into with Windows Vista were application incompatibilities…but you just expect that kind of thing to happen when a new OS is released. I did notice, however, that a lot of the early complaints about Windows Vista were coming from audio enthusiasts and computer-based musicians, who were mentioning all manner of driver problems. Creative and M-Audio were the two companies receiving the most criticism concerning driver problems, but the beta driver I was using to make my SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum work under Vista didn’t seem to be giving me any problems….
It is now one year later. On Monday, I wiped Windows Vista off of my computer and replaced it with the default installation of Windows XP that had come with it. It took that particular copy of XP about two hours to download all the hundreds upon hundreds of updates that it needed to get caught up, but once it was fully updated and I’d spent a few more hours reinstalling all my software and copying my data back from its temporary exile on an external hard-drive, I’m happy to say that I am rockin’ and rollin’ (and bloggin’ and cussin’) more effectively than ever once more.
“So, Pegritz?” you ask. “What finally killed your love of Vista? I mean, just a few months ago you were still saying that it was a perfectly serviceable OS and that the many people calling it a waste of time and a major mistake for Microsoft were completely full of shit. So, what gives? Did you catch Vista doin’ your girlfriend or something?”
OK, then—here’s your answer.
Let me begin by reiterating a few things I’ve said a few times about Windows Vista. First of all, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the OS from a usability point of view: despite a lot of bitching and moaning about “Oh, they moved my Command Line shortcut! Those horrible bastards!”, the GUI is no more nor less accessible than that of Windows XP. In fact, I prefer it a lot to XP. Not only is it better looking, but simple things like the list of “favorite” folders visible in every Explorer window makes it so easy to keep data nicely organized by keeping all your most-used folders a single click away. It doesn’t take six video cards, each with a gig of memory apiece, to run Aero with full transparency effects. Vista did not run one bit slower than XP on my machine, and actually started up faster. Finally, I never once ran into any form of DRM- or protected-media-related problems because I do not own or use any DRM-encumbered media, period.
So what’s so wrong with the OS that I don’t want to use it anymore? Let’s see:
SIN 1: AUDIO.
The first and most serious problem with Windows Vista is entirely related to audio. You think inferior NVIDIA drivers caused a lot of Vista crashes? You should see Creative’s track record. To put it mildly, audio in Windows Vista sucks. Big time. Though Creative’s beta Vista drivers for my SoundBlaster X-Fi worked just fine, their official Vista drivers are completely nonfunctional. They would work for anywhere between five and twenty minutes before crashing with a horrific !!!SQUEIIEIEIENK!!! that nearly destroyed my speakers and scared me so badly a number of times I nearly shat my pants. I would then have to reboot the damned system to enjoy another five-to-twenty minutes of good sound before OHMYCHRISTWHATTHEFUCKWASTHATHORRIDSCREECH?!!?! Oh. It was Creative’s useless fucking drivers blooching again. Between April 2007 and March 2008, Creative has issued at least five, or maybe more, revisions to their Vista X-Fi drivers. Guess what? Not a single one of them worked with my X-Fi. Not one. I attempted to ask what the hell was going on at Creative on their discussion boards, but never received a reply of any sort. I finally discarded the X-Fi card after Creative pulled the ultimate boner by asking a fan who actually made functioning Vista drivers for the X-Fi to cease and desist. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll never own another Creative product.
I eventually purchased an M-Audio MobilePre USB audio system because it was portable (it connects via any plain ol’ USB port), it was much higher-quality than the X-Fi, and it featured a number of inputs to let me record live instruments into my computer. Of course, the reputation of M-Audio’s Vista drivers is not much better than Creative’s, but the MobilePre USB came highly recommended and, even better, was cheaper than any other audio solution. In fact, it was so cheap I even could afford to purchase two studio-quality monitors to go with it! When I brought it home, I downloaded the Vista drivers from M-Audio’s website, installed them, and plugged the MobilePre in. Worked like a charm. Until, that is, I had to reboot the computer for an unrelated issue a few days later. Vista would not recognize the device. I had to uninstall and re-install the driver, and then it worked again. Great, I thought, I’m gonna have to do this every time I reboot the damned machine? I contacted M-Audio to ask about that. Their answer: All of our Vista drivers are betas (STILL?! After the fucking OS has been in the marketplace for over a year?), and, besides, none of them support Vista SP1 yet.
Wait a second. As far as I know, Vista Service Pack 1 has nothing at all to do with the OS’s audio system. Why the driver would work under Vista but not Vista SP1 is completely beyond me but, hey, I’m not a programmer. Either M-Audio is incredibly lax when it comes to writing drivers, or Vista’s new audio subsystem is harder to parse than a Klingon translation of Finnegans Wake.
Audio hardware under Vista was not my only cause of grief, however. Audio software was even worse. Cakewalk Sonar was the first (and, to my knowledge, still the only) major DAW that released a version capable of running under Vista…but “capable of running under Vista” and “running well under Vista” are too completely different things. Fortunately, my alltime favorite audio workstation, Renoise, worked just fine under Vista…provided that I had User Account Control shut down completely. For some reason, none of my VST plugins would work on Vista if UAC was turned on (as, by default, it is). Needless to say, UAC was turned off immediately and never turned back on. I have no need for a goddamned operating system to ask me again and again and again if I’m sure I want to copy something.
Ultimately, though, between hardware problems and software problems—neither of which are present in XP—I finally decided that it was time for Vista to go. One of my primary uses of this computer, after all, is music production. It’s why I bought this particular machine in the first place: it had plenty of memory and a super-fast dual-core processor so I could run lots of effects! But…with Vista, it just got to a point where I do that anymore.
SIN 2: WEIRD INSTABILITY.
ANY pre-SP1 Microsoft OS has problems, because Microsoft always, always rushes stuff out the door before it’s actually ready. Considering it took five years and extensive beta testing to get Vista ready, though, you’d think the bugs would’ve been fewer. Nonetheless, they were there. But no big deal. Bugs happen, and after a month or two of working with Vista, I’d grown to know those bugs pretty well. Subsequent Windows updates even eliminated a great deal of them.
Yet…Vista was always a shaky system, regardless. Every now and again, it would do something extraordinarily weird—so weird that I could never be sure whether the problem was a hiccup in the OS, a user error, or some kind of demonic possession. For instance, every now and then I’d get what I took to calling a “sour boot”: for whatever reason, Vista would boot improperly—certain startup programs wouldn’t start up, certain services wouldn’t start, and Vista would then either run very slow, its processor usage would spike at odd times, it memory usage would go through the roof, or the OS became next to unresponsive. One time, when I got a “sour boot” (just a few weeks ago), I attempted to open Firefox 3 beta 4. It took twelve minutes for Firefox to load. I know I keep a lot of tabs open, but DAMN! That’s a little excessive.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the many times my temperamental audio player, J. River Media Jukebox, suddenly stopped working or played mp3s backwards.
The only way to get Vista back to working normally was to reboot and hope I didn’t get another “sour boot.” At first, I used to get them only once in a blue moon. By January, though, I was getting “sour boots” at least one in ten times. By March, it was happening almost every other time I restarted the damn machine. This, along with a few other issues, was something I was hoping SP1 would get rid of. But it didn’t. Which brings me to Sin Numero Tres:
SIN 3: SP1 MADE EVERYTHING WORSE.
I remember fondly when Windows XP SP1 was released. I didn’t really know what a “Service Pack” even was, then (I don’t remember there being Service Packs for Windows 98 or ME), but I installed it and…Windows XP just kept working like it always did. Windows SP2, on the other hand, did show some marked improvements in the system. Needless to say, I was pretty hyped for the release of Vista SP1, which I figured would solve a lot of the various “rushed-to-market” bugs and issues. I should’ve known something was up when Microsoft kept pushing the release of SP1 back further and further and further….Finally, though, it arrived, and I installed it.
The number of odd instabilities—random program freezes (that would last up to two minutes before the program would just come back to life), crashes, strange error windows, and, of course, even more audio problems—that had been making the OS more and more annoying to use in the past few months TRIPLED. It was like SP1 literally made the OS more unstable than ever before.
One of the great Vista irritants that I was hoping and praying Vista SP1 would correct would be the interminable file-copy or file-moving times. I frequently move large amounts of data from one external drive to another (for example, when I’m backing up my sample library or all the music I’ve composed). Try moving 15 gigs of data with pre-SP1 Vista. Oh, look at that: the little copy windows is telling me that it will take 1 hour and 45 minutes to move 15 GB of files. “Oh, pshaw,” you think, “it can’t take that long. XP used to give weird copy-time numbers too.” But look at that…it really did take Vista 1 hour and 45 minutes to move 15 GB of data. This was a well-known Vista headache and SP1 promised to fix it.
Well, it didn’t. In fact, as I was moving all my digital photos and documents to a safe external drive prior to wiping Vista out and replacing XP, it took nearly four hours to move 69GB of data. I guess that fix wasn’t actually included in SP1.
Regardless of the copy-time issue, the sheer frequency of instabilities and problems increased noticeably after SP1 was installed. Thank the Other Gods I didn’t have any problems installing SP1, as many others did…but, unfortunately, though SP1 installed successfully, it only seemed to make things worse.
SIN 4: GETTING PROGRESSIVELY WORSE INSTEAD OF BETTER.
The final sin of Windows Vista is sort of a metasin, being a sin comprised, in part, of all previous sins. When I first upgraded my old computer to Windows XP way back in 2001 or ‘02, I noticed a few bugs and problems here and there in XP that Windows 98 didn’t have. Regardless, XP was a HUGE improvement over 98, and a VAST improvement over Windows ME. As time went on and Microsoft added hotfixes and patches to the OS, its performance got better and better. Today, after greater than half a decade of refinement, Windows XP is a tank. Everything runs just fine on it, and weird problems are rare.
I expected the same experience from Windows Vista. Actually, I even expected it to be a little worse with Vista, because the difference between Vista and XP was so much greater than the difference between XP and Win 98/ME. Nonetheless, when I first installed Vista, I was impressed: it really ran pretty well, and the various audio and application problems I experienced with it would eventually vanish as better drivers were produced, Vista-compatibility issues were worked out. That’s just how it went with XP, after all!
But…no. Rather than getting better, as the months wore on, my Vista experience grew progressively worse. Applications seemed to develop more problems. Hell, I couldn’t even get the Beta Version of Internet Explorer 8 to install on the damn thing: it would copy all files and finish the installation, but the second I clicked on the IE button to open the browser the program would instantly crash.
The file-copying problem got worse and worse.
I even began to have trouble with Renoise—the most trouble-free piece of software I’ve ever owned! I would click on the Samples folder to access my audio files…and every single hard-drive attached to my system, either internally or via USB or Firewire, would grind and grind and grind for about three minutes before the list of sample folders would finally appear. Renoise never did that on XP! In fact…Renoise had never done that on Vista, either. Until I installed SP1.
A lot of people have been comparing Windows Vista to Windows ME, the strange, buggy, half-assed successor to Windows 98 that generally stands beside Windows Bob in the Microsoft Hall of Shame. I used to laugh at such comparisons. ME was a thousand times buggier than Vista, and its performance actually worsened as time went on. In fact, one of my friends at Laurel Computers in Uniontown once told me that the only way to keep ME running okay was the completely reinstall it every two to three months.
It didn’t strike me until Monday, when I was thinking about reinstalling Windows Vista again to get rid of SP1 that…I had reinstalled Windows Vista at least four times, every two to three months. That was the only way I’d managed to keep it running smoothly. By the end of that two/three-month grace period, something weird would happen that would kill the OS’s effectiveness and then I’d have to reinstall it.
Wow. Could those comparisons actually be right? Is Windows Vista merely ME 2?
Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t have a test machine anymore that I can install Vista onto to see how it works on a different computer, so I can’t independently verify that. Perhaps someone reading this would like to let me know about his or her experiences with Vista. Are you experienced “ME Two” behavior, or has it been smooth sailing from Day One? Inquiring nerds want to know!
But anyway, there you have it: the reasons why I gave Vista the boot. I have been running all of my software just fine on XP these last few days, and haven’t discovered any discernible problems. None of the weirdness I experienced in Vista is happening under XP. The problem obviously lay with the OS, and not with my hardware (which I was actually beginning to suspect).
The question now stands: Will I ever return to Vista?
Not any time soon. Eventually, I would really like to, because, quite frankly, I found Vista’s GUI to be perfect to my computer usage style and I liked a lot of Vista’s features. Vista will, eventually, I hope, prove to be a worthy successor to XP…but until the day comes that it can demonstrate the same stability and lack of weirdness that XP actually displayed from Day One, my Vista installation DVD will be tucked in the back of my software shelf, next to an ancient set of Castle Wolfenstein floppies that I keep for sentimentality’s sake and the pencil sharpener I haven’t used in fifteen years.
Technorati Tags: vista,windows vista,vista ap1 xp,windows xp,microsoft,operating systems,problems,headaches
HP’s Upline: Good Idea, HORRIBLY Executed
April 16th, 2008
A few days ago, on one of my favorite sites, TechCrunch, I discovered Hewlett-Packard’s new Upline online storage service. I’m a big HP fan, and Upline’s unlimited online storage for just $59 a year sounded like a flatout amazing deal—especially since hard-drive crashes in the past several years have cost me well over $3000 to retrieve vital data from the failed disks. I immediately signed up for the Upline “Home” plan for $59/year, created an Upline account, and downloaded the Upline client. Wooyeah! I was ready to upload everything from my entire mp3 collection to all my documents, every musical track I’ve ever written, and even my vast sample library…to a place where it would remain safe even if the Magneto were to bust into my house and destroy all of my external backup drives with one gigantic kilogauss “Fuck you!”
Yeah, well, that’s when the trouble started.
At the time, I was running Windows Vista Home Premium on my home computer, the HPL Laboratories of Pennsylvania Mainframe (an HP m7580n). Installing the Upline client went smoothly, but after the client had been running for a few minutes, scanning over the folder that I had selected for backup, the client just…vanished. I’d gone to the ‘fridge for a drink and when I came back, it was just gone. We’re talking Natalee Holloway Gone here: no traces, no crash warnings, nothing. Puzzled, I restarted it, and it again needed to go through its initial account set-up procedure (none of that info had apparently been saved the first time), then once more started scanning for files to upload. This time, it got as far as beginning to upload the files. After only 1gb of data had gone “up” the “line”, the client again…*POOF*. This time I witnessed it with my own shocked widdle eyes: both client windows, the large detailed one and the little “basic” one that appeared above the system tray just disappeared.
This time, thinking some kind of serious shit was happening, I consulted my computer’s event logs. Both Application and System logs showed no crash alerts or even informational entries related to the Upline client. It simply would not stay active for very long. And when it decided it was finally time to catch a bus to Reno, it slipped away from my desktop as quietly as a cat in the night, leaving no traces of any ill activity behind.
I immediately reported this via email to HP who, after a few bounces back and forth providing outputs of my System/Application logs and some other technical info, responded that
There is no known issues with upline application with VISTA home premium 32 bit. You could either try clean boot to troubleshoot the issue .
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135Also if you have different computer you could try on that and see whether upline application is shutting down.
Now, I have been having more and more strange problems with Windows Vista over the past few weeks than I’ve ever had before, so I figured this was just yet another Vista problem. (My frustration with Windows Vista had been growing since October, and SP1 had actually made many of the problems, mostly of an audio nature, worse than they’d ever been—but I’ll post about that later.) I decided that the camel’s back had finally broken. My patience had finally worn out. It was finally time to “upgrade” back to Windows XP, which I did today. I restored the original XP installation to my computer and, after cleaning out the usual crapware, installing a few hundred updates, and just generally tinkering around with various settings to make sure everything was the way I liked it, had a nice, clean, perfectly stable Windows XP environment running.
After copying my personal data (y’know, all the stories I’ve written, Cthulhu pr0n I’ve downloaded, and illegal XviD rips of Andy Griffith) into XP’s “My Documents” from their temporary exile on one of my external drives, I decided it was time to set up and configure Upline once more—hopefully without any goddamned, weird-ass Vista craziness.
Instead, guess what? I experienced even stranger problems. Twilight Zone problems, people. Seriously. Witness:
To begin with, the installation crashed twice. Never a good sign. I finally got the client to install, however, and entered my account information and selected folders to back up once again. The familiar two Upline windows appeared and the client began scanning the files in the selected folders, just like before. It was chugging along just fine when—wait for it—my monitor went black. Black as the depths of the interdimensional portal at the heart of the Event Horizon. The computer was still running, and the hard-drive was still grinding as if it were being indexed, but…the monitor was in power-down mode. It’s power light had turned orange and NO DVI INPUT was flashing on the screen. Now let me tell you…I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life. Not even when I had a video card go bad. All that happened that time was the screen resolution went wonky. It didn’t turn into a gateway to the Chaos Dimension.
So I pulled the plug on my computer and restarted it. Once it restarted, the Upline client launched automatically at start-up and—you guessed it—I had to input all the login information, select folders, yadda yadda yadda. I was thoroughly sick of the damn thing by this point, but “Hey,” curiosity said to me, “Lessee how it fucks up this time!” Well, this time the screen didn’t blank out, and the client finished scanning, but when I clicked the Backup button the client froze. Froze up like you’d just thrown its processor thread into a vat of liquid nitrogen.
To cut a long story short, I attempted to get the client to work precisely six more times. Four of those times, it froze the second I clicked Backup (and could not be shutdown by any means short of killing the process in the Task Manager [interesting sidenote: the client was using upwards of 300MB of memory each time the process had to be killed]). Twice more, it made my monitor/video-card/what-the-hell-ever completely shut down and blackness, the vile blackness of complete unknowing, prevailed once more.
Needless to say, I called to cancel the service and demand a refund. Prior to this, my experience with HP products and services has been top-notch: I’ve never had any trouble with my desktop or my laptop (both HPs), nor with my printer/scanner, nor with any of the software or drivers I’ve ever gotten from HP. Anytime I’ve ever contacted HP Customer Service, they were incredibly helpful, too—and they were this time, as well: the lady whom I spoke to on the phone took down all of the information needed to refund my payment via PayPal and even provided me with a case number to consult to ensure my refund is received. HP Customer Service is excellent. Too bad their Upline client, however, is a total piece of shit.
To sum it all up…HP’s Upline sounds like it could be a really amazing service. Only $60 a year to back up literally all your data? That’s serious value there, folks. But not if the software client you need to get your data up that Upline can’t even stay afloat long enough to tally up a single folder’s worth of Microsoft Word documents. Pathetic.
HP, if someone one of your tech people gets wind of this blog entry, listen up: I will gladly repurchase an Upline Home Account again if you can prove to me that your client isn’t some half-assed hunk of schizophrenic code anymore. If you get the goddamn thing to work—and by work I don’t mean “work every now and then” but work as well as the drivers to my Photosmart C6280 All-in-One printer/scanner/toaster thingee do—then I’ll gladly hop back on board.
Because right now, I can’t afford to buy 500gb external hard-drive to backup still more data onto. I’ve run out of USB ports! I have a USB hub plugged in to another USB hub and I still don’t have enough damn ports….If USB ports were dollar bills I’d be a…a…well, I’d have enough money to buy another USB hub at Staples.
Friday Fivehead: Our Daughters Wedding, Landscape, Cut Copy, Moby, and More Buggles!
April 10th, 2008
Yowza, yowza, PEGRITZ(.com)!/The New Pollution listeners! Here cometh another Friday Fivehead, and this week we’re spanning decades of music here, folks: we start in 1980, leap to the Dawn of the 21st Century, then turn around and zip right back the early ’80s…because back then literally all music was Wicked Awesome. But no matter how far apart in time these albums are, they all share one particular characteristic in common: they seamlessly mix electronic sounds with traditional instrumentation to produce dance-pop so goddamn infectious it will invade your DNA so that your kids will all be born wearing jelly bracelets, Hammer pants, and Day-Glo fishnets. Seriously, people—a scientist told me, so it must be true! Like, his newborn son came born wearing a Men At Work t-shirt after he spent six weeks listening to Boy Kill Boy, so…do be warned, mmmkay?*
Let’s get started with Our Daughters Wedding. I recently discovered that you can score hundreds of oldskool New Wave albums on Amazon.com. Many sadly forgotten acts like Polyrock, EBN-OZN, New Musik, and, of course, Our Daughters Wedding have had their music remastered and re-released on CD…and you can get every damn one of those CDs on Amazon for ridiculously low prices! At any rate, Nightlife: The Collection is a sort-of “Greatest Hits” compilation that gathers up material from all of the singles and albums ODW ever put out, remasters it all so the sound is absolutely pristine, and offers it up to you at a damn good price. If you like classic synthpop full of weird, awkward-sounding lyrics, lush analog synth bleeps and bloops, and live bass and drums, then ODW is definitely for you. In some ways, they sound a bit like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark when that band was first starting out, but Our Daughters Wedding has a darker, stranger angle that OMD: even seemingly-straightforward dance songs like “Love Machine” have a subtle menace to them, a sneering cynicism that is pure post-punk. Most folks only know one or two ODW songs—either “Lawnchairs” or “Target For Life”—from various New Wave compilations…but trust me: those are not their only two good songs. This collection is jam-packed with jams of a most bootyrocking order. Get those skinny ties out and get ready to hit the dancefloor in your livingroom when you get this CD!
Landscape is another sadly forgotten, but monumentally entertaining, synthpop group from the early ’80s. Best known for their insanely-catchy single “Norman Bates”, Landscape was actually a rather prolific group that released three albums and quite a few singles, and had been touring since the mid-’70s as a rock/jazz/punk experimental outfit. Eventually, though, they began to flesh out their sound with synthesizers. This jazz-influenced electropop sound was most prominently featured on their second album From the Tea-Rooms of Mars to the Hell Holes of Uranus. The version of From the Tea-Rooms that currently appears on Amazon is not their second album, alas, but a best-of collection that collates great material from the entire span of their recording career. Jaunty analog synths, buzzing basslines, fuzzy synth-percussion, and vocoded lyrics all slam together in their music to create a very unique sound that lies somewhere between Herbie Hancock and Nintendo soundtracks. “Einstein A-Go-Go”, their second biggest hit after “Norman Bates”, is a bouncy number that has been used so many times in commercials and TV shows about technology that you’re almost guaranteed to recognize it from somewhere the second you hear it kick in. Nonetheless, if you like melodic, yet still experimental and twitchy synthpop with a very pronounced post-punk edge to it, then Landscape are your boys. But don’t blame me if, after listening to “Norman Bates” six times in a row, you can’t stop saying, “My name is Norman Bates / I’m just a normal guy (doo-doo dooo)”!
Now it’s time to leap forward two decades to find Cut Copy offering up their second album In Ghost Colours. Though the members of Cut Copy probably weren’t even born when New Wave was riding high, their music captures the unique “synths-and-real-instruments” sound so brilliantly, you’d swear they have a time machine and spend their weekends hanging out with Thomas Dolby in 1981. Their music is so beautifully lush, with multi-layered synths, guitars, and pumping beats, that it’s easy to lose yourself in a state of trance-like ecstasy on the dancefloor when “Feel the Love” with its unearthly, vocoded chorus kicks in. Cut Copy’s particular brand of New Wave synthpop adapts the lushness of Violator-era Depeche Mode with the funky glee of Our Daughters Wedding and Industry. The songs blend together seamlessly on the album, but it’s always clear when a new track has started, because despite the mingling of intros/outros, each song is quite distinct. This is most definitely not an “every-track-sounds-alike” album, but a dense, lovely collection of modern New Wave songs that soar on their notable melodies and their unrelenting energy. And like all the best synthpop, their lyrics evince a certain shoegazing melancholy while the music and beats swell majestically all around as if they’re trying to save their singer’s life.
And then there’s Moby. When I first heard of Moby in 1991 or ‘92 (via the Cool World soundtrack), Moby was one of the guys at the forefront of the “techno” craze, making music that was edgy, jarring, and entirely artificial. I liked techno for about ten minutes, but quickly tired of it because it’s so relentlessly artificial and repetitive that it eventually sounds like you’re just listening to an old modem squelch when you’ve dialed up CompuServe. Fortunately, Moby has grown over the years since then, and has put out a number of consistently enjoyable albums that feature a more full array of instrumentation yet still maintain ol’ Mobe’s sense of producing a great dance song. His newest album, Last Night, is a rock-solid chunk of dance music with a very pronounced disco influence (hence the first single, “Disco Lies”). Whereas Moby’s last two albums have been rather relaxed, adventurous affairs, Last Night is all about last night at the club. Diva vocals, swirling strings, buzzing bass, and thumping beats all slam together to form a giant audial disco ball that casts shattered reflections of a hundred different layered sounds onto your ears as you move to the unstoppable beat. But this is definitely not techno. Not by any means. This album is pure synthpop, and would’ve been welcome in dance clubs all over the world in 1982.
And, finally, if last week’s feature on (The) Buggles‘ first album was enough to get your curious about the band, then here’s a review of their legendary, almost-impossible-to-find second album from 1981, Adventures in Modern Recording. Unless you want to pay over $100 for the Japanese import of Adventures in Modern Recording, then you’re going to have a hard time getting hold of this album, aren’t you? Nope. Some dedicated Buggles fan has made a torrent for the latest reissues of The Age of Plastic and Adventures in Modern Recording! Now you, too, can experience Trevor Horn’s final Buggles effort, a collection of pure synthpop tunes that are literally all over the map. “I Am A Camera”, the only single from the album, is the most straightforward synthpop song on the album, and is so filled with hooks you’d think it’s a tacklebox. The other songs, like “Beatnik”, “Vermillion Sands” (a tribute to sci-fi author Robert Heinlein) and “Rainbow Warrior”, take more experimental approaches toward the concept of the “pop” song, and as such may be a little more challenging to folks who just want straightforward jams like “Video Killed the Radio Star.” But fear not! Never once does this album become too experimental: each song is built from a flawless pop melody, and the vocals are all clear as crystal and catchy enough to sing along to. This is a mighty album, and a true lost gem. Do yourself a favor and grab the torrent so you can enjoy the pillowy synths of “I Am A Camera” and the alienating Moog bassline of “Rainbow Warrior” and the vitriolic beauty of “Lenny.” This is one that just cannot be missed.
And there it is, folks—another Friday Fivehead in the can. Next week, stay tuned for the previously-promised review of Dragonforce’s blistering power metal masterpieces Sonic Firestorm and Inhuman Rampage, plus another Friday Fivehead stuffed with more mutant music and superpowered jams!
*PEGRITZ(.com)!/The New Pollution accepts no responsibility for genetic mutations resulting from the reading, appreciation, or ingestion of this blog item.
Technorati Tags: music,review,synthpop,new wave,our daughters wedding,nightlife,landscape,from the tea-rooms of mars to the hell holes of uranus,cut copy,in ghost colours,moby,last night,buggles,adventures in modern recording
The Biggest Farce in the History of the World
April 9th, 2008
You may wonder why I haven’t been writing much about DRM or Big Media. You may even miss my vitriolic rants against the sheer, mind-boggling stupidity of the recording industry and my anarchist Internet beliefs….
But the simple fact of the matter is: the RIAA, the entire recording industry (both in America and abroad), and the MPAA—Big Media in general—have made such a pitiable laughingstock of themselves that I simply ran out of vitriol. Spewing righteous hate at those industries is almost meaningless now, as they have shamed themselves so dramatically in so many ways that I literally haven’t a thing left to say about them.
What the hell can I possibly say about that? It’s so ridiculous it has literally left me speechless. And do you people have any idea how incredibly difficult that is?!
More “City of Pillars” Evil Has Arrived!
April 9th, 2008
Wow. After so many busy weeks, I’ve finally gotten back into the swing of writing, and that means that the fifth chapter of “City of Pillars” is online! Here’s a sample:
“The world did not end with the destruction of Manhattan,” the bored old general in charge of Project Reclaim Manhattan had said to close the pre-tour briefing. “America did not end with the destruction of Manhattan. Not even New York City ended, though it was grievously wounded. Despite the incredible loss of lives and property on September 11, the Azifist mission to wake the Great Old Ones did not, after all, succeed. Great Cthulhu still sleeps. Irem, the so-called ‘Nameless City,’ today is secure under Coalition forces. With the loss of their capitol and their leadership, the Cthulhu cultists have been driven underground like rats; they will be hunted down one by one, if necessary, and made to pay for their crimes against Humanity. The Great Traitor, George W. Bush, is no more and his Xinaian cabal has been driven back to K’n-Yan to face prosecution by their own people. As President Obama recently stated, ‘Now is not the time to think of all the terrible things that have passed, but of the fruitful, bountiful days that are just now beginning. ’ The Revised Manhattan Rebirth Initiative is both a practical and symbolic example of our nation’s willful resilience. Manhattan will someday rise again; the Five Boroughs will be complete once more. So remember, all of you: what you will see today is going to be disturbing. But you must not dwell on the sundered past. Look beyond the wreckage to the future: Manhattan reborn like a phoenix from the ashes. The clean-up has, for all intents and purposes, only just begun. It will take many more years. But never forget: this is a time of beginnings. And the rebirth of not only New York City but of the United States begins here.”
It was obvious from the way that he read the speech from a typescript and never once looked up at the audience that he didn’t believe a word he was saying. Desultory applause followed him off the podium and out the back door. We were divided up into groups, given packets of information containing “all we needed to know” about the Project and plastic protective overalls to wear over our clothing, then we were hustled out to the waiting choppers. Once I was seated and strapped down, I closed my eyes and listened to the speeding beat of the rotors, trying to think of nothing but the whup-whup-whup of metal slicing air. The helicopter lifted off so smoothly I didn’t even know we were off the ground until Greg leaned over to me and muttered: “Look at that. Dave. Dave. Look.”
See what I did there? It’s horror plus witty, contemporary political commentary! Hell, y’all might as well start calling me The Bill Maher of Lovecraftian Fiction!*
*Please, don’t. My head is big enough already.
Friday Fivehead: The Buggles, Don Turbolento and Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Infadels, and Snoop D-O-Double-G
April 5th, 2008
It’s Friday, and time for a new feature here on PEGRITZ(.com)!/The New Pollution: The Friday Fivehead—five quick reviews of albums so awesome they will knock your hairline back a few inches! Some of the music will, naturally, be brand new, hot-off-the-skillet fare, but you can expect me to throw in some forgotten, overlooked, or otherwise “old” jams as well, ’cause sometimes y’all just needs to be reminded just how damned awesome some older music is. Hey, maybe you missed it your first time through, or you’re a youngster who needs some educatin’. At any rate, enough of the preliminary jibba-jabba: let’s get shakin’ here, peeps.
(The) Buggles‘ first album The Age of Plastic came out in 1980. Twentyeight years ago. Almost three decades. And yet…even today, in 2008, this album still sounds remarkably futuristic. And it’s not because of the futuristic, science-fictional bent of the lyrics (most notable in songs like “The Plastic Age”, “I Love You Miss Robot”, and “Johnny On The Monorail”). Even though the music on The Age of Plastic features perfectly average late-20th-Century instruments like guitars, acoustic drums, and of course oldskool analog synths that you could hear featured prominently on many a rock, pop, post-punk, or even “easy listening” album in 1980, the songs’ arrangements by certifiable musical genius Trevor Horn (who seems to be able to turn any musical project he touches into gold [see Yes, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Seal, and, of course, The Art of Noise]) and occasional-collaborator Bruce Woolley give them a catchy, pop-inflected, but eerie and almost alienating strangeness that conjures images of gleaming skyscrapers, robot maids, flying cars, and silver spacesuits even while the songs have you bouncing and bopping around. This album is like an artifact from the post-Singularity future; it’s as if Trevor Horn wrote this album sometime in 2061, awash in amazing technology but wistful and nostalgic for the music of the 1980s…so in 2061 he wrote a retro-pop album that somehow made its way back in time to give us a glimpse of a transcendental future full of awesome rockamaroll!
Don Turbolento is one of the best bands I’ve ever discovered via MySpace…a site which I just love to hate, even as it A) provides my music with a means of reaching more and more fans and B) exposes me everyday to more and more great music. DT is a two-man electro firestorm from Italy, so chances are, you probably won’t be seeing them live anytime soon if you live in the States and…well, one must go through less-than-scrupulous means to secure their debut self-titled album. But holy crap, do it! Minimal analog synths bounce along over skittering, scattering—but always danceable—live drums while Dario Bertolotti’s pure, unadulterated post-punk vocals stab through to set off neon bursts of New Wave dynamite under your ass. This is an album aimed at both electro and post-punk fans alike, and its aim is simple and almost religiously pure: to provide you with powerful synth-driven dance-punk that will keep your dancefloors sparkling and your computer speakers glittering. Their music is smooth, yet rough-edged and jittery; polished, yet abrasive at times and slightly rusty around the joins. This album is, in fact, the very definition of modern retro: an honest attempt to produce something that sounds like it should’ve come out in 1978…and goddamn does Don Turbolento do a superior job of doing so! Stuff the “retro is so over” attitude up your arses, hipsters, and just dance and be glad that there are bands like this producing such great dance music for you. Otherwise, what would you be doing? Listening to emo?
Does It Offend You, Yeah? is one of those simply ca-razy bands like Holy Fuck that just sound like a full-on electropunk freak-out. You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Into, their first album after a number of singles that only hinted at the depths of snarly power they could pump out, is chock full of great, high-energy jams that manage to marry the low-brow snottiness of classic ’70s punk with experimental electronic music in such a way the entire album sizzles with electricity and attitude. The band’s name is perfectly chosen. This is a seriously in-your-face musical effort that very well could offend electronic and punk purists. GOOD FOR ‘EM. Anyone who finds him- or herself so wrapped up in issues of genre purity needs punched in the teeth. Does It Offend You, Yeah? is so full of crossover craziness that they’re damnear impossible to define, but comparisons with The Automatics and Enon are probably spot on. DIOY,Y? is a thousand times more confrontational that anyone else, though; this record blasts out of your speakers like an army of Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers full of beer and looking for a good damn time that might destroy your livingroom.
Infadels debut album We Are Not the Infadels proves that yes, the Infadels really are all they’re cracked up to be. Equal parts britpop, dance-punk, and glam-rock, Infadels sounds a bit like a more British, more New Wave-oriented Scissor Sisters with a more electronic feel and an Oasis-like bad attitude. The lead song on the album, “Love Like Semtex,” sounds like classic Duran Duran mixed with The Soup Dragons and The Faint. If you like your dance music melodic, catchy, and complex but still extremely easy to bounce to, then We Are Not the Infadels is the album for you. If Don Tubolento and Does It Offend You, Yeah? are a little too hard-edged for you, but you still like that New Wavey guitars-and-synthesizers dance sound, then Infadels will definitely satisfy. The album is smoking hot and full of energy from track 1 through track 11, with only one mysterious lull (”1′20″) to give you a second to relax before we’re back to the rockamaroll. Highly recommended.
And finally, venerable ol’ Snoop Doggity Dogg, the ol’ D-O-Double-G Himself is back with his ninth—NINTH, people!—album Ego Trippin. So what can you expect? Songs about bitches? Check. Songs about makin’ money? Check. Songs about being a bad-ass? Chickity-check. Songs soaked in the influence of late ’70s and early ’80s synth-funk goodness clearly inspired by and derived from The Gap Band (Charlie Wilson appears all over the album, again, as usual) and Prince, etc.? CHIZZECK! A country song dedicated to Johnny Cash that’s all about smokin’ reefer? Ch…What?! You heard me. “My Medicine” is a 100% country song. And it comes right in the middle of standard hiphop monster jams as “Staxxx in My Jeans”, “Ridin’ In My Chevy”, “Deez Hollywood Nights”, and the sensual dancefloor-destroying lead single, “Sensual Seduction/Sexual Eruption” (depending on whether you have the “explicit” or “clean” versions)*. Nonetheless, this record represents a much softer side of Snoop than the straight-up gangsta attitude of The Blue Carpet Treatment. This is an album by a man who is maturing despite the fact that he’s still pumping out swaggering numberings to keep his fans happy. The final three tracks, the incredibly heartfelt tribute to his wife “Once Chance (Make It Good)”, the heartwrenching soul anthem “Why Did You Leave Me” (which literally sounds like an updated Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes song), and the stirring Hood tribute “Can’t Say Goodbye” really show that Snoop could be making some very, very touching music if only he could permanently say goodbye to his gangsta side and all those who expect that from him and just write an album 100% from his real man’s heart. It would be something special to hear.
*And may I take a moment to say that “Sensual Seduction” actually sounds better than “Sexual Eruption.” The suggestive, but not blatant lyrics, work better with the ’80s feel of the song. The more sexually-explicit lyrics actually sound anachronistic. It’s almost like expecting to be listening to a Levert song and hearing Gerald Levert say, “I got a bad bitch wit’ me every day of the week.” It’s jarring, almost!
So that’s it, folks. The first Friday Fivehead is in the can…even though I actually just published it at 1:25am on Saturday morning. Come on, yo—I was playing D&D all day and buying my girlfriend a birthday present! Nonetheless, I bet you know what I was listening to all day as I was doing that stuff!
See you next week with even more jams and, before that, a thorough appreciation of power-metal masterminds Dragonforce! Keep your heads ringing, people. Peace!
Technorati Tags: music,review,the buggle,living in the plastic age,don turbolento,does it offend you yeah,you have no iodea what you’re getting into,infadels,we are not the infadels,snoop dogg,ego trippin,new wave,hiphop,disco-punk,electro
I highly suggest that those of you who particularly enjoy music-related posts like this check them out over at The New Pollution, because Vox.com features a number of excellent, easy-to-use mp3 uploading abilities that let me provide you with streaming samples of the music I’m reviewing. Sure, I could do that hear, too…but why waste the time with all the tweaking when I can do it by default over on Vox?
