W♥M (Archive)

Clap Your Hands, Sign A Declaration

Yankee Go Home

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!

If they were in the habit of keeping Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable up to the minute, and you were to go looking for the definition of "To Damn with faint praise", you would probably find a link to this review of Clap Your Hands, Say Yeah's second album, Some Distant Thunder.  I can't say that the review is entirely unfounded, but when caught between my own glee looking of looking forward to it, and such a gut punch of a review, it was twice as difficult to judge the album fairly.

Luckily, for everyone involved, it's Independence Day in these United States in just a couple of days.  I've ended up independent in my own way, but that's the sort of ironic twist that my life tends to throw at me, just to make sure I'm still an existentialist.  But I digress.  What better way to celebrate the holiday than with a common refrain heard around the world whenever our great nation is mentioned?

And what's more: what better way to make sure that you weren't one of those people living in a cave who hadn't heard of these fellas, while totally side-stepping the issue of whether or not the album is actually worth the price of admission!

God Bless America,
W.

Phillip Roebuck: One Man Band Meets The Hipsters

Love For The Damned

Phillip Roebuck

I have a feeling that Lester Bangs himself would have been proud of the rise of Phillip Roebuck.  I mean, what could be more classically unhip than strapping a bass drum to your back and playing banjo on street corners and subways?  It has this scary Appalachian vibe to it, or the unsettling feeling that the Keystone Cops could appear at any moment.  And yet, Phillip Roebuck somehow manages to look like a goddamn rock star in his publicity photos.  At the risk of publishing the same quote everyone else in the damned world has used:

"Phillip Roebuck is poorly suited to written description. Merely describing what he does makes it sound trivial, when it is actually mind-blowing. Phillip is a one-man band in the traditional mould: He sings, plays banjo and harmonica with a bass drum strapped to his back, which he operates with a foot-powered harness that also plays the tambourine and maracas. See? That sounds silly, doesn't it? But Phil isn't silly, he is both a delightful oddity and the purest kind of genius. He plays in a frenetic style that suits his reedy, mountain-style singing, and manages to sound both plaintive and raucous at the same time. Look past the contraption and be enlightened." - All Tomorrow's Parties program notes, 2004

He's teamed up here and there to lend his banjo skills to The Boggs and Brooklyn Browngrass, but when you're a one man band you... well...  you're a one man band.  His latest album, released last year, is available on his website and through emusic.

You know it's me because I forget to sign my posts until the second pass,
W.

More Video Game Music: Jet Grind Radio

While I certainly can't claim the sort of video-game music aficionado status as some of my friends, I do have at least one claim to obsessive compulsive fame.  I sat in front of my Dreamcast with the sound out rigged into my computer for most of a single night in order to record and rip all the background music for Jet Grind Radio.

And while it may lack some of the lo-fi charm of the Tetris songs, Jet Grind Radio had a much smaller cult following for its use of cel-shaded graphics to create a cartoony feel to the lighthearted mayhem cause by vandalism of public places.  (It even had the most adorable, "We think grafitti is art, but it's still illegal.  Please don't do it." disclaimer every time you started up the game.)

A good chunk of the songs were by Hideki Naganuma who, as far as I can tell, works primarily in video game soundtracks, but included a few high profile cameo songs for a set of levels set in a fictionalized NYC, including Rob Zombie and Jurassic 5.  (There is one level that is so close to the area around the Lorimer St. JMZ station that I kept wanting to take my character into the McDonald's that I knew was there.)

 

Rock It On (original)

Sweet Soul Brother (original)

Magical Girl

Enjoy,

W.