Season...Two?

Unemployment was the best thing to ever happen to my desire to write.  And that goes for all varieties of writing. Finally getting a job earlier this summer...well, that killed all that momentum; unread-music-blog-writing included. 

I've been listening to a lot of music!  I've been listening to a lot of music that makes me think "Well, I really ought to write about this...if only so that I can read this when I'm 60 and can't remember what kind of noisy shit I liked when I was half my current age."

So, again, here's more of this. 

RIP MCA

The Beastie Boys were a group who seemed omnipresent in my youth.  There was never a time where I got "into" them, because they had always seemed to be there.  Early on, I remember songs like "Fight for Your Right" and "No Sleep Til Brooklyn" being local radio staples and catching their music videos on MTV was as easy as just turning the television to MTV.  I remember rapping along to "So Wat'cha Want" from the car stereo of an older camp counselor at summer camp in the summer of either '92 or '93.  I remember seeing the video for "Sabotage" for the first time and wanting for there to be an actual Sabotage TV show that looked just like that video.  I remember waiting outside of my tiny local record store on the day that Hello Nasty came out, incredibly eager to get my hands on the then new album.

When I think about artists and bands that've never let me down, I think the Beastie Boys may very well be at the top of that short list.  The amount of talent in this group, whether it was rapping, rocking, funking or just being experimental, was always just astronomical.  Even with their latest album, last year's Hot Sauce Committee Part 2, the group was continuing to simultaneously impress and satisfy music fans.

Which is exactly why it's so hard to believe that MCA, Adam Yauch, has passed away at age 47 from cancer. 

MCA had always been my favorite of the group.  Sometimes it seemed easy to call him the "serious one," but we're also talking about the same guy who directed most of the insane videos from Hello Nasty on.  If anything, he was the most well-defined of the Boys, I always thought.  His gravely rapping was always a welcome counterpoint to Mike D and Ad-Rock's more nasally approach.

There's little to say that hasn't already been said, outside of personal reflections on MCA and the Beastie Boys.  Honestly, I just wanted to take the opportunity to thank the Beasties, especially MCA, for all the years of perfect music and amazing talent.  No matter what the future brings for the remaining Boys, I will forever be thankful for what we've already been given.

RIP, MCA.

Review: The Chromatics - Kill for Love

I tried a few awkward opening paragraphs, some about the time it takes to digest some albums and some about the impact of the movie Drive on the rising popularity of today's featured band.  But, no matter what I wrote, all I wanted to do was get right to the point.  So, here we are, in a much shorter opening paragraph that can simply segue into how I feel about the new album from The Chromatics' Kill for Love:

I absolutely love this album.

My 'Terrible' Mixtapes: The Orange Mix

The original idea of this blog, and the idea that I have not yet (until now) pursued, was to take a look back at the various mixtapes and mix CDs that I have lying about from my years of music fandom.  Some would be mixes that I made for myself or other people, while others would be mixes by others that gave them to me.  I am not actually insinuating that my mixes are or are not "terrible."  Self serving and pointless, sure, but whether or not they are actually "good" isn't really the point of this exercise.  With that said, here's the first installment of such a thing:

In 2002 I found myself in art school for most of my time, a welcome change of pace from the myriad of retail jobs I had endured in between my last failed venture to college and then.  As excited as I was to be in a design program that I actually cared about, most of my excitement from that time came from my acquisition of a laptop computer (paid for by my student loans of course).  Having such a current and cutting edge piece of technology in my possession was ridiculously exciting to me, and I spent countless days worth of hours customizing it and exploring it. 

One of the best features of the new computer, I found, was the inclusion of a CD-RW drive, something that I hadn't ever had the pleasure of owning at home - though I had used them in my few month stint working at a college radio station. 

Apologies for Brief Hiatus

So, as the title may suggest, a short span of time has transpired since my last entry in this blog and now.  It wasn't that long, I suppose, but the longest break between posts yet and it seemed worth commenting on.  I'd like to say that the reasons for this lapse in posting had to do with me getting a proper full-time job or that I was busy with some project.  But the truth is that I've just been lazy.

And I've been reading books.  What kind of excuse is that?

Anyways, this blog is not yet dead.  Thanks for reading.

Review: WZRD

It doesn't surprise me that Kid Cudi would choose for his next project to be an "alternative rock" album.  His last album, Man on the Moon II:  Kid Cudi and the Chamber of Secrets* was definitely leaning pretty hard on rock, and let's not forget that MGMT and Ratatat both showed up for the first MatM album.  In fact, in listening to WZRD (and, yes, that is pronounced Double-You Zee Are Dee), I'm curious as to why Cudi even felt the need to separate this from his solo material, except for perhaps the prominent contributions of producer Dot Da Genius.

Trouble in the Fortress

Deciding that it would be a good idea to finally organize all the music I have on my PC into one folder (a system that should've been in place from the very beginning, yet was not), I began the process of moving files around.  Unfortunately, due to a few mistakes/errors/magical-curses, I ended up losing a very very large percentage of my music.  With data recovery software only giving me bits and pieces, its safe to say at this point that a lot of the music is gone.  It's not so bad, as I have a lot of it backed up, but most of what I've lost permanently are albums from this year. 

So, what I'm saying is, forgive any delays that may come in updating the blog.  Either I'll straighten things out sooner than I think and I'll be back to offering new content here, or I'll there will be a week or so where there's not much going on here while I try to rebuild my library.

On the positive side, this was an awfully good means of getting rid of a ton of music that I don't listen to anymore.  For example, I like Asobi Seksu, but I certainly was never going to listen to three hours of live recordings from them.  Sheesh.