Day: December 3, 2005

“Twin Cinema” — The New Pornographers

Twin Cinema

Angela bought me the lat­est album by the The New Pornog­ra­phers last month, despite her mild dis­com­fort with the band’s odd choice of name. After let­ting her hear a cou­ple of songs, she decid­ed they were okay after­all and even has a cou­ple loaded onto her iPod for bop­ping around the house to.

She pur­chased the song off of iTunes Music Store, which is where a lot of our music comes from these days1. I had heard about the album back over the sum­mer in an NPR piece about great sum­mer music, even though the album was­n’t even out yet. They played a 45–60 sec­ond snip of one of the songs. I had also lis­tened to each of the songs 30-sec­ond clips on iTMS and decid­ed I like what I heard.

I was then com­plete­ly blown away when I lis­tend to the album in its entire­ty. Each song is like an mul­ti-move­ment pop-sym­pho­ny. The song you are lis­ten­ing to at the begin­ning isn’t like the mid­dle or end, and the pro­gres­sion is both nat­ur­al and amaz­ing. Songs like “The Bleed­ing Heart Show” change and evolve in a way that would leave both pro­po­nents of Dar­win’s The­o­ry and I.D. stunned.

Also, the band has a very hard to pin down tax­on­o­my. They strum gui­tars and bang on key­boards like a true rock band, but also show the emtion of the mood­i­est of emo and indie rock. How­ev­er, I don’ t think I’d ever call them indie, since to the best of my knowl­edge, hey-la hey-la cho­rus­es are by def­i­n­i­tion, not allowed in indie rock (see also “The Bleed­ing Heart Show”). The lyrics are smart and this ablum’s addi­tion of song­writer A.C. New­man’s niece Kathryn Calder on vocals (and piano) add even more lay­ers of nice to a great album. If you like vari­ety in your rock and want some­thing new and sol­id, you should have this album in your collection.

  1. We love the con­vience of iTMS, but of course the DRM is a bit frus­trat­ing. I typ­i­cal­ly burn and re-rip the music bought there for two rea­sons: 1) a phys­i­cal back-up in the event of hard-dri­ve fail­ure and 2)Re-ripping removes the DRM on the music. [↩]

Happy Birthday Super-Structure

Super-struc­ture turns one year old, today.

Super-struc­ture turns one year old, today.

Okay, so I’ve had a web site for some­time longer than that, but it’s nev­er been so much fun as now. Hav­ing peo­ple to be able to com­mu­ni­cate back to me has real­ly made this very reward­ing for me. I feel like I’ve been in much bet­ter con­tact with fam­i­ly and friends over the past year than before, even when I lived much clos­er to some folks. This site, and also Flickr, have real­ly made that com­mu­ni­ca­tion possible.

I’ve aver­aged one post every 2.66 days dur­ing the past year, which is actu­al­ly a lit­tle less than what I had intend­ed. Some have cer­tain­ly been bet­ter than oth­ers, and I still have some thoughts on how I could bet­ter orga­nize things here. Still, I’ve been fair­ly hap­py for the amount of work I’ve put into it. I still have a life in the real world, and that requires atten­tion, too. Else, what would I have to blog about?

Many thanks to Jason J. for all his help, as well as all the pro­gram­mers and web peo­ple I don’t know who have all made this so much eas­i­er than it used to be.