Bar none the worst album I’ve listened to is the Everclear covers debacle.

Bill Moyers’ PBS podcast
Walt Disney World Today podcast (Hey, we go in August!)
Apocalyptica – Worlds Collide
The Sword – Gods of the Earth
Dokken – lots and lots of Dokken
Pantera – Great Southern Trendkill & Far Beyond Driven
Beatallica – All You Need is Blood (English version)

And the usual Slayer, Metallica, with Unearth thrown in every now and then. Love that tune “Giles”. And Bullet For My Valentine, too.

avett brothers-four thieves gone; emotionalism
wilco-being there
bob dylan-nashville skyline
the kinks-something else by…

i also saw the waco brothers last week and it was the best show i’ve seen in ages.

But they’re at the top of my rotation at the moment:

The Arcade Fire – Funeral
Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam (that’s their 2006 album)

Finally going to see Pearl Jam live at Verizon Center in two weeks.

Alestorm – Captain Morgan’s Revenge (pirate metal! this will SUCK)
Band of Horses – Cease to Begin
Children of Bodom – Blooddrunk
Flogging Molly – Float
Guilty Simpson – Ode to the Ghetto
Martha Wainwright – I Know You’re Married but I’ve Got Feelings Too
Ringo Starr – Liverpool 8
Tift Merritt – Another Country
Van Morrison – Keep it Simple

Municipal Waste – The Art of Partying, Bay Area-style thrash with some hardcore crossover appeal, think Suicidal plus Slayer, sweet live show, too, boogie board stage diving, circle pits, and over-the-top awesome all-around.

Dayton Family – Family Feud, 2006-ish era thugged out rap from Michigan, Three 6 Mafia would be a decent comparison, I suppose…

Ignite – Our Darkest Days, melodic hardcore punk, imagine Rise Against minus the really annoying fans

The Famine – The Raven and the Reaping – Do you like Pantera? Do you like bands that kick ass? You should probably listen to this.

The Bouncing Souls – How I Spent My Summer Vacation, um, really, this is the perfect summer record.

Comeback Kid – Broadcasting, quality hardcore

Weezer – Red, I love Weezer, saw them on the comeback tour ages ago with the Get Up Kids, and they ruled. Dudes acting like GUK were Pantera, not so much.

If you want a better run down -
www.last.fm/user/xonetruedesirex

Honestly, I’m not listening to a goddamn thing right now. I was listening to a shitload of Latin music when I was down in Mexico recently, but I have no idea what any of it was called. The shit kicked ass though, especially some of salsa and the Cuban stuff.

For me it’s been a steady diet of the new Disturbed CD. I would discuss here, but you can know whether you’d like this disc based on the last one. For me, that’s a good thing.

Also in the mix:

10 Years – Division (It’s like a less-crappy Incubus, or a less-pretentious A Perfect Circle)
Ashes Divide – Keep Telling Myself It’s Alright (the lead guitarist from A Perfect Circle gone solo, really quite good)
36 Crazyfists – The Tide and Its Takers (but their last disc was much better than this one)
Life of Agony – Broken Valley (I was late to the party on this one, but I’m enjoying it so far)

...and that’s most of my recently-obtained stuff.

I love these off-topic posts. These are the ones I keep coming back to.

Ghostface Killah, “Fishscale”
Gaslight Anthem, “Sink or Swim” & “Senor and the Queen”
EU’s Arse/Impact split
Sera Cahoone, “Only As the Day is Long”
Shook Ones, “Sixteen”

The celebrity-made record of the year is the She & Him record. Ryan from the Loss Column and I were comping it with the ScarJo record…no contest.

And, hey, a little help from the peanut gallery. Should I skip next Wednesday’s game for Mark Kozelek at the Ottobar, or do I really want that ‘83 hat more?

Nothing new for me lately, I just haven’t had the time to seek out new stuff. But I have been enjoying my stock.

Nada Surf – The Weight Is a Gift
Depeche Mode – Songs of Faith & Devotion
The Cure – Mixed Up
The Fugees – The Score
The White Stripes – Elephant

I saw the Cure down in VA recently for the 2nd time. They went sans synth, which I thought would be a mistake, but they then amazed everyone with how well they can rock out. Just an amazing, amazing band. What a great show.

And maybe later I’ll be rocking out to some Manilow. But only the early stuff… I don’t really care for anything that came after Barry’s wild experimental stage.

Since he died, I’ve broken out a lot of my Bo Diddley records. The man was an original, and truly great.

On the iPod recently:

Mudhoney – The Lucky Ones
Otis Redding – Otis Blue
Solomon Burke – Proud Mary: The Bell Sessions
Nick Lowe – Nick The Knife
Super Furry Animals – Mwng
Vampire Weekend – s/t
Elvis Costello – MOMOFUKU
Rainy Day – s/t
The Go Betweens – 16 Lovers Lane
George Jones – She Thinks I Still Care: The Complete United Artists Recordings
V/A – The Johnny Cash TV Show
Big Star – Third
Shuggie Otis – Inspiration Information
Sly & The Family Stone – Small Talk
Trotsky Icepick – Baby
Love – Forever Changes
R.E.M. – Accelerate & So Much Younger Then (live bootleg)
The Brothers Johnson – Right On Time

Looking forward to the reissue of Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue next week.

Roisin Murphy – Overpowered
Elle Milano – Acres of Dead Space Cadets
The Books Elusive – Perform
The Ting Tings – We Started Nothing
Late of the Pier
Grammatics
The Video Nasties
Manic Street Preachers
Ivy – Apartment Life
Hum – You’d Prefer an Astronaut
The Pigeon Detectives
Jawbox
The Clik Clik
Mew
Sam Sparro
Unwound
The Scaramanga Six
Alphabeat – Alphabeat
Yelle – Pop-up
Black Kids – Partie Traumatic
Glasvegas
Sky Larkin
Moenia – Exitos
Forward Russia – Life Processes
Captain
Envy & Other Sins

http://www.last.fm/user/indianwarpaint

The Exploited – Troops of Tomorrow
SSD – The Kids Will Have Their Say
Chain of Strength – (can’t remember the album name)
The Damned – Tales From The Damned
Black Flag – Damaged
Chokehold – Instilled
Youth of Today – everything they made
Judge – What It Meant…
Integrity – Humanity Is The Devil
Ink & Dagger – first 7” and The Fine Art Of Original Sin
Rotting Christ – Triarchy of the Lost Lovers, Non Serviam
Marduk – Opus Nocturne
Burzum – Burzum/Aske
Darkthrone – under a funeral moon, ravishing grimness
Danzig – I, II, III, and IV
etc…

Non-metal/hardcore/punk
Mountain Goats – Talahasee, All Hail West Texas, We Shall All Be Healed
Young Jeezy – whatever the last album is called
Biosphere – Substrata
Brian Eno – Music For Airports
Raison d’Etre – Enthralled by the winds of loneliness
Negativland – Fair Use

Metallica will kill Bonaroo.

Love the tune on GH3, “Prayer of the Refugee.” Which CD should I start with with these guys?

She & Him – Volume One
Foxboro Hot Tubs – Stop Drop and Roll!!!
Neil Diamond – 12 Songs (never listened to it, but figured I should since I got…)
Neil Diamond – Home Before Dark
The Last Shadow Puppets – The Age of the Understatement

Alestorm’s pirate metal wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. Pretty entertaining really.

Paul Weller – 22 Dreams
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
Sleepercar – West Texas
Hayes Carll – Trouble in Mind

the Backstreet Boys, Busta Rhymes and Liza Minnelli…you’d know why I stay in a lot. Anyway, here’s my two cents worth on the scene in this neighborhood of E. Europe:

1. # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

Strolling through the Latvian capital of Riga earlier this month, I had a “globalization moment” - sort of a “senior moment,” except that I remember it just fine, thanks - induced by large billboards heralding concerts by the Backstreet Boys and Busta Rhymes.

If Florida boy bands and Flatbush rap acts are selling tickets in Latvia, my epiphany went, then modern youth culture really has gone global. There’s no more East vs. West, no more First, Second and Third Worlds, no more post-this or ante-that for the planet’s now-homogeneous young consumers. The Boys and Busta can move product anywhere but Pyongyang and Minsk, and not by drawing on some transportable fan base of Groupies Without Borders. The market is universal.

This simply hadn’t registered with me—until suddenly it did. When Busta raps in Riga, I realized, the revolution is officially over. I have seen the future and it’s jerks.

To be fair and balanced, Busta is now a jerk on probation, the Boys aren’t jerks at all and these acts have as much to do with the past as the future. Let’s take the past first, starting with mine.

I first visited Latvia on a field trip from Leningrad in 1975, before gangsta rap and suburban neo-barbershop were even gleams in a promoter’s eye. Riga, alas, didn’t offer much more for visiting American students to listen to than had Leningrad. From outlying Kamchatka to the occupied Baltics, the whole Soviet Union was formally hostile to “bourgeois” music of all stripes, with Western pop and rock groups leading the list.

True, 1975 was not 1955, when Soviet music lovers made bootleg boogie-woogie recordings on X-ray plates and listened doggedly for every un-jammed note of the Voice of America’s jazz hour. By the mid-1970s, the Soviet state had grudgingly reached a tacit cultural compromise with its rising generation: If you don’t rattle the cage too loudly, we will tolerate long hair, some indigenous pop groups and even throw you a bone once a week - which they did. On Saturday nights at 11:30 - when young people were likely to be out and about or out cold—Leningrad radio aired a show called “Your Tape Recorder,” offering Western music for young fans to copy however they could. It wasn’t much, but it sure beat nothing and was aurally devoured like forbidden fruit.

Like millions of other people who spent (or did) time in the Soviet Union, I still have occasional flashbacks to Soviet deprivations like the pop-music drought. Sure, Chuck Berry has played Moscow four times, Paul McCartney has filled Red Square and Deep Purple is the nation’s First Rock Group. Yet in some anterior lobe of my middle-aged brainpan - no doubt the section that processes Proust and “The X-Files” - there are still synapses convinced that in places where Russian is heard, Western pop music isn’t. At least not loudly and certainly not in public. So my mind, as in Riga, finds itself playing catch-up.

But back to the future - which is not Busta and the Boys. They are “relics of the ‘90s,” whose appearances and album sales on former Soviet territory offer limited prospects - or so say my English students from the music management program at Moscow’s Gnessin Academy of Music. These kids take courses like Finance and Taxes for Cultural Enterprises, Statistics, and Strategic Management. They deride MTV Russia as clueless and Eurovision as tunnel vision, but they’ll give you a working estimate of how many tickets various artists will sell in Moscow, from Blondie to Iggy Pop, in a heartbeat. See, that stuff matters.

The Boys and Busta are marketable here, but to diminishing audiences. The next globalees will want the next thing—not the Boys of ‘93 or your father’s hip-hopper. But the good news for these performers is that they will always find a venue in Moscow, say the proto-managers. Acts that have had significant success in the United States will always sell tickets to Muscovites who have heard of them but never seen them live, apparently. Even Liza Minnelli.

To my Riga story, a senior student parried that what’s afoot is less the globalization of pop music than its Americanization. Asked whether this is good or bad, the same student - who serves as press attache for a major Russian jazz artist - simply shrugged. “It just is. Music evolves and you deal with it.”

Fair enough. Only in my case, you deal with it a little later than everybody else.

H2O – Nothing to Prove
Verse – Agression
Killing the Dream – Fractures

re-added
Integrity – Seasons In the Size of Days
Integrity – Systems Overload

It was Towson State’s station and played the best underground music until they changed the format to New Age music and the call letters to WTMD in the early 90’s.

I was introduced to a huge amount of amazing music on that station when I was in high school. They also had (and still have, I believe) the Saturday Morning Polka Hop, which kicked ass too.

in one part of the song he says: “I ain’t trippin nigga, I play the corner like Ripken nigga
With the 40 Cal Ripken nigga, rip a nigga”

I’m listening to the new Usher Cd. I like.

The Ting Tings are a minor obsession. I’m revisiting the Tilly and the Wall and Faint back catalogs in anticipation of upcoming albums. Also, Lykke Li, whose album hopefully will get a US release soon.

Otherwise, in terms of older stuff, I’ve gained a newfound appreciation for Another Side of Bob Dylan. Continual Regina Spektor.

Also, lots of French house music. Daft Punk, Justice, stuff like that. Been going to a fair number of dance parties.

Oh, and MGMT. Definitely MGMT. Love them. Cut Copy, a little bit.

wish I was special
You’re so very special

But
I’m a creep,
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doin’ here?
I don’t belong here

I don’t care if it hurts,
I wanna have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul
I want you to notice
when I’m not around
You’re so very special
I wish I was special

But I’m a creep
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doin’ here?
I don’t belong here, ohhhh, ohhhh

I have one of the portable units that allows me to record a song that I like, so I basically have a bunch of songs that I love, but don’t know the names of the most of the songs or artists. I usually cull the songs from XM 12 Cross Country, which plays a lot of Americana/Alternative Country.

This is how I discovered that I liked Lyle Lovett.

Some of this stuff is pretty gay but oh well… It changes drastically based on what moods I get in.

Weezer – Weezer (Red)
We Are Scientists – Brain Thrust Mastery
Van She – Van She EP
Modest Mouse – Building Nothing Out of Something
Modest Mouse – Good News for People Who Love Bad News
Weezer – Pinkerton
As Fast As – Open Letter To The Damned
The Wildlife – Sweet Plastic
Rooney – Calling the World
Rooney – Rooney
Better Than Ezra – Before the Robots

is this his most rockin album in 30 years? mind you, i’ve only heard about three tracks on the radio, so maybe they’re outliers.

i am listening to ORIOLES MAGIC on mp3 ripped from original vinyl …..

download

FEEL IT HAPPEN!!!