"Fun" With A Former Format Leader

I was really sad when The Format broke up. It was the first in a string of bands I really liked breaking up, and that was the first time since Rage Against the Machine fizzled out that I had to deal with bands I was a fan of not making music together anymore.

Well, now I get to enjoy some "new" music by at least one of those bands. Nate Ruess, former lead singer of The Format, now has a new band: fun. Yeah, all promo material points to the name being lower case.

He's teamed up with Jack Antonoff and Andrew Dost to form the new trio, and they're recording during September for a first release. They're on tour with Jack's Mannequin later in the fall, with a single planned for November and an album due in February 2009. Take a listen to the demo for "Benson Hedges" at the link below. It definitely sounds like The Format, which is good if you're a fan, but I wonder what new direction, if any, they'll take as a new outfit.

fun - "Benson Hedges (Demo)"

Oklahoma City's NBA Team Has A Nickname: Thunder

It's been leaked for about a month now, but today the Seattle, excuse me, Oklahoma City NBA franchise has a new nickname, and it's not the one we all knew it should be (the Bandits). They are now officially the Oklahoma City...Thunder. Sounds pretty lame doesn't it? Check out their website here.


There were a ton of leaks of the name along the way. There was the discovery of the website domain purchases, the NBA website screwing up and posting a schedule for the Oklahoma City Thunder, and then the news the OKC trademarked six different nicknames.

Here were the six nicknames the NBA filed trademarks for: Barons, Bison, Energy, Marshals, Thunder, and Wind. Of those six, Energy, Bison, and Wind are just ridiculously bad. Energy is a WNBA or WUSA-caliber name, Bison were hunted to near-extinction in the Old West, and Wind is just plain terrible. Barons and Marshals are actually two pretty good ideas, and I'd give my vote to Marshals, but Thunder is clearly the weakest of the top three.

The last team to go through a naming fiasco this bad was the Houston Dynamo of the MLS. The original idea was to name the team Houston 1836, after the year of Houston's founding, but the name came under fire for being linked with the Texas War for Independence, and was changed to the ridiculously lame Dynamo...or maybe I'm just bitter they took my Earthquakes out of San Jose for a few years.


Come to think of it, the people that have been doing a good job of naming teams lately are MLS teams. Names like Real Salt Lake, Chivas USA, FC Dallas, Toronto FC, and the expansion team Seattle Sounders FC are proper team names. I've always liked the idea of nicknames developing on their own through a fanbase instead of an artificial mascot propped in front for a new team. Old names in the NFL and MLB are good and traditional, but football always had the right idea about naming teams. Rumor has it the new team in Philadelphia will be named Philadelphia Athletic, which already sounds cool.


Teams in European leagues like Charlton Athletic or Atletico Madrid use the name, and I don't see any reason to burden the team with silly adjectives or nicknames from the get-go in football.

Take Two: Weezer

There are a lot of people who don't like Rivers Cuomo and his band Weezer. Some don't like his style altogether, others don't like the directions he's taken the band in the years since their resurgance with The Green Album. I don't really care, because I am a huge Weezer fan. Always have been, always will be. There are a few bands that I will follow in whatever musical direction they wander, and Wezer is one of those bands. Here's my take on their albums:



Weezer (Blue Album)

"Say It Ain't So" - It's a wonderfully vivid story told through the lyrics, and the chorus roars through as Rivers rises to a scream. The most powerful point may be when he suddenly crescendos during the second verse, ending on "be cool." The guitar intro is great as well.

"Only In Dreams" - My personal favorite Weezer song of all time. Its an epic track that builds through its immense bridge slowly but surely, rising to a climactic finale. It starts off blissfully, and its transformation into a slow burner is fantastic.



Pinkerton

"Across The Sea" - Rivers plagarized a letter from a Japanese girl so badly in this song that he actually gave her a minor songwriting credit. It's the apex of sexual frustration that inhabits the album, without a doubt their best in my mind. The lewd fantasies of the narrator give way to youthful lonliness, and the emotional and generation shift in the tone of the lyrics is a reason why I believe Cuomo is such a gifted songwriter.

"The Good Life" - After the frustration that haunts the entire first half of the record, this track begins side two by shoving off the complacency and vowing to get back to partying and getting out there. I love the transitions on this record, and the sequencing is excellent, especially with these two songs right after one another, then "El Scorcho" and "Pink Triangle" in succession. It plays through like a great sexually frustrated narrative.



Weezer (Green Album)

"Photograph" - Returning with a new record after 5 years, The Green Album was full of short, punchy, almost teaser songs for the new incarnation of the band. "Photograph" is my favorite of the short, sweet, simple songs on this record.

"Island In The Sun" - Yeah its cheesy, and now its overplayed and used in commertials, but its still a wonderfully relaxing and happy song, great to listen to in the summertime. I'd gladly put a couple more songs from Pinkerton in place of these two, as I find the album to be too short to really offer great songs, but these are some of the best on the record.



Maladroit

"Keep Fishin'" - Any music video that features the Muppets is okay in my book. I love the riff, the chorus, the lyrics, the rocking, everything about this song is what I like about Weezer...except for maybe a little turned down relaxed vibe.

"Burndt Jamb" - Speaking of a great relaxed vibe, this is the buried gem on Maladroit, perfect for sitting back and chilling, with a little guitar solo chucked in for kicks. I like the balance between virtuosic solos and chilled-out verses on this album a lot.



Make Believe

"Perfect Situation" - Almost ten years down the road, and Rivers is still as frustrated as he was on Pinkerton. Much like with Dashboard Confessional, it may be odd to hear the romantic frustrations of a thirty-something, but Rivers makes it work most of the time. The chorus might be a bit weak, but the verses are another great dose of his romance storytelling.

"This Is Such A Pity" - A welcome change of pace and stylistic exploration for the band, I really like the 80s feel and straight-ahead, no stopping sensability of the track. It's another reconciliation track with romance breaking down, but it wouldn't be a Weezer song if there wasn't at least a little of that.



Weezer (Red Album)

"Troublemaker" - Originally intended to be the first single from the record (until the record label-dissing "Pork and Beans" came along in the final sessions for the album with Jacknife Lee), I really like the simplicity of the song. It's no nonsense, simple progression, and really catchy.

"The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations On A Shaker Hymn)" - A great epic track that changes styles about every 30 seconds, adding a choir here, a power ballad guitar there, and everything between. It goes on for a long time, but I enjoy hearing the quick changes and the myriad of styles the band molds to each time they switch. A lot of people have grown tired of how Cuomo does his songwriting, but he does take it seriously, and I think there are legitimately great songs on every Weezer album. You just have to give the stylistic change a chance, and it'll grow on you.



Non-Album Tracks
"Jamie" - From the Deluxe Edition of The Blue Album, another one of Rivers' perfect lyrical portraits. It's got romance, a tinge of humor in the heartbreak, and a great sound.

"I Just Threw Out The Love Of My Dreams" - The only surviving song from the aborted Songs From the Black Hole album/musical to have full female vocals. It shows off how that concept would've sounded when fully realized, and I have to say, it would've been awesome. People have compiled demos and unreleased tracks to form the unfinished album, and Songs From the Black Hole sits in Top 10 lists of best unreleased or unfinished albums all the time. The female vocals are from Rachel Haden of the band that dog, and now the reformed version of Weezer ex-bassist Matt Sharp's The Rentals. It's a shame the album never got finished, but this one suriving, essentially finished look makes me lament the loss of the fully realized album.


So there's another one of my favorite groups whittled down to just a few tracks per album. I'd love for them to return to the form of their first two albums, but they've gotten too old to express that kind of feel in an album. I just hope they find a groove as they grow older to make something that everyone can appreciate as much as their first forays.

The Next Big Sound is The Next Big Sound

I'm in a fraternity at Northwestern, and I distinctly remember hearing a conversation in the house where one of the older brothers that I really like was concerned about not having a job for the summer. Well, a few months later, there shouldn't have been any concern.

The Next Big Sound was founded by a group of 5 guys, two of whom are in my fraternity, working on a project in an entrepeneurship class that got investors from the Illinois Ventures Program. They got their fledgling site off the ground this summer in Champaign, IL, and now its up and running as a startup business in Evanston.

Here's how it works. Users who sign up on the site are called "moguls" who create their own faux record label. They then listen to demos submitted by unsigned artists on the site. If they like the band's music, they "sign" the band to one of ten artist slots designated to each user. Moguls sign artists that they think other people will want to sign, hoping to earn points as a band gains popularity. The bands are rewarded for more people signing them, and the moguls are rewarded when more people sign the band after them. The site keeps track of who signed a band first, so you can actually prove you were listening to a band before anyone else.

It is a little bit more of a business game than it is discovering music, but hey, when you get to pretend to have your own label with music that you like, there's a little bit right in the world.

A lot of bands from the Chicago area or with members at Northwestern see a huge boost in popularity on the site, but that's not to say that eventually it couldn't have regional success anywhere. It's sort of like PureVolume, but with much more user input and involvement. It gets the fans in direct control over who is successful, because to be 1 of only 10 slots you have to sound pretty good to a lot of people.

The site draws comparisons to networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, especially the latter's music section, but there's less of an emphasis on networking between users and more on a fantasy business/game vibe. There's a box office prediction game that I've played every now and again called Fantasy Moguls that is essentially fantasy football for movies, and this site runs a lot like fantasy football with unsigned musicians and bands.

Here's a link to my profile on the site. Take a look at what they've got going there, these guys deserve some success with such an interesting idea.

I Am An Air Bud Apologist

There are a few movies in each generation that stick in childhood minds more than others. Disney animated films are ubiquitous, but some children don't latch onto them. I have my favorite Disney animated films, but there are live actions ones I thoroughly enjoyed. Bedknobs and Broomsticks for instance, is a great memory from my childhood, as is Mary Poppins. In later years, there were many Disney films I watched on video, but one theatre experience stands out from all the rest: 1997's Air Bud.

It's easy to say that because of a series' later disasters, the original loses some respect, but I beg to differ. I feel like Air Bud has a ton of classic moments in my childhood that the later sins of Golden Reciever, 7th Inning Fetch, and the like cannot sour.

Most kids from the 90s know the story. "Buddy" the golden retriever with the ability to hit a ball with his muzzle, belongs to a mean, abusive clown named Norman Snively (they really stayed impartial on the character with that name, didn't they?), but escapes. Josh Framm's family has just moved to a new home in Washington state after the death of his father, and is too shy to play basketball, the sport he loves. Of course, the boy meets the dog, the boy tries out for the team after meeting the school's "engineer" (who's actually a retired ex-player for the New York Knicks), and Buddy becomes the accidental team mascot after demonstrating his ability to hit the ball into the basket with his muzzle. There's a generic underdog plot going on here for the basketball team, but there's also much more subtle commentary that I only picked up on vaguely as a child, but now notice and commend the filmmaker's for including.

There are three moments that raise Air Bud out of the realm of forgettable and repetitive children's fare, and have stuck in my mind forever.. First, there is the demon of a basketball coach at Josh's school. After the first game Josh plays (one in which Buddy runs onto the court and causes a commotion), one of his teammates has repeatedly dropped the ball. During a thrillingly annoying speech from Josh's principal, he sees Buddy running back towards the gym, where everyone finds the coach chucking basketballs at the poor kid. There's only one light on in the gym, directly above the boy being struck by basketballs. I know mean coaches now, but back then I was scared by this guy, and I'll never forget the principal's line "That'll be enough coach...that'll be enough."


Second, there's the ball hog of the team, Larry Willingham (played by Brendan Fletcher, who went on to appear in the Nickelodeon series Caitlin's Way and The Onion Movie). He's your generic ball hog that always wants the ball and hates his teammates, but his dad is one of the first onscreen examples of terrible athlete parents I ever saw. Mr. Willingham is essentially a second coach for the team in yelling at his son for small mistakes, and eventually yanks his son off the team to move to Spokane so he can play for another team. Obviously this team in Spokane is who Josh's school plays against in the championship, giving the "good guys" a chance to defeat the meddling father who should stay out of his son's athletic life and let him choose what to do. I've seen parents destroy their children's athletic dreams due to too much pressure to succeed. Even my friends at Stanford notice Michelle Wie's parents and their horrible meddling into their daughter's life.

The third moment is perhaps the most heartbreaking. When Snively sees Buddy on television, he comes back to claim the dog. Josh breaks Buddy out before the championship basketball game, and attempts to set Buddy free, but the dog won't understand that he has to leave his new owner. Josh is forced to yell "Get!" at the dog repeatedly, ending in screaming with tears rushing down his cheek before throwing a basketball for Buddy to chase in the wrong direction before running away. I own a golden retriever, and I think of Air Bud every time I play with her, and that scene still brings a little tear to my eye. Giving up a dog, or watching a pet separated from its owner, is always heartbreaking.

I'm a sucker for dogs, underdog stories, and movies from my childhood, and Air Bud hits all three of those buttons. Call me soft, sentimental, or hypocritical for liking these movies, but I distinctly believe that there is a difference between what we find great, and what we personally like. Can I apologize for the terrible lighting in much of this film? Or the overacting by Josh's mom and several of the kids? No, but I don't care, I find the dog story incredibly enthralling, and I will always stick up for this movie.

Northwestern Football Mini-Preview 2008

I didn't get excited about going to home college football games until after I had arrived at school last year. I got the field over an hour before the game and sat in the front two rows of the student section with new friends, and had one of the most important experiences of my year, even in losing to Michigan 28-16. I became a die-hard Wildcat fan that afternoon, and it carried through the entire season as I watched every game in the front rows or on television, even road tripping to Champagne, Illinois to watch our season-ending rivalry game with the Illini.

Yesterday, the Northwestern University Wildcats' 2008 football campaign opened with a win over Syracuse University. Senior running back Tyrell Sutton got his season off to a great start, hopefully erasing memory of an injury-ridden 2007 season, and the defense started well, even getting a safety to open our scoring. The first quarter didn't go so well, but we went into the half in the lead and never looked back. We depend on a senior offensive trio of Quarterback CJ Bacher, wideout Ross Lane, and Sutton to light up the scoreboard. Our defense last year was incredibly leaky, bleeding yards and big plays all over the place, and hopefully will hold better this year with a new defensive coordinator.


Here's our schedule for the rest of the season (home games in bold):

at Duke University
Southern Illinois
Ohio
at Iowa
Michigan St.
Purdue (Homecoming)
at Indiana
at Minnesota
Ohio State
at Michigan
Illinois

Looking at that schedule, the Wildcats need to win their first four games. We've gotten ourselves a lucky schedule once again, avoiding Penn State and Wisconsin. If results are the same as last year, we take wins at home against Michigan St., and away at Indiana and Minnesota. If that hold true, we end at 7-5 and are bowl eligible, but that's not what could happen in the best case scenario. We should have beaten Iowa at home last year, and they haven't shown too many signs of being better this year, and we definitely should have beaten Purdue away as well. It isn't likely, but we could head into Columbus, OH with a 9-0 record. In the absolute best case, we'd steal a game from the Wolverines, take our rivalry game with Illinois, and have an 11-1 record through the Big Ten season. Will that happen? Probably not. We'll probably lose at Iowa and either Indiana or Minnesota, and home against Ohio State. Besides that, I think we've got a pretty good chance in every home game, and could steal a win from Iowa or Michigan. All in all, I'd say we go 8-4 and run off to a bowl game. I know I'd be making the road trip wherever we'd be headed, and so would a ton of my friends.

I Know Everyone Is Tired of The Movie Movies...

Yesterday saw the release of the latest "spoof" movie Disaster Movie. In the past 8 years since Scary Movie came out, there have now been 9 films in the series. It started with the Wayans brothers, moved to David Zucker (of Airplane! and The Naked Gun fame), then to Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg for the Non-"Scary" Movies. Here's a list of the loosely tied together "series":

2000 - Scary Movie
2001 - Scary Movie 2
2003 - Scary Movie 3
2006 - Scary Movie 4, Date Movie
2007 - Epic Movie
2008 - Meet the Spartans, Superhero Movie, Disaster Movie

I don't know about anyone else, but this series is pretty much the worst ever made. I don't think a single one of them has a positive score on the Tomatometer or on IMDB. I'll be honest, I enjoyed Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2. They had the right kind of bad humor going for them, and at least they parodied horror movies for their blatant silliness. Even 3 and 4 kept a reasonable amount of the parody within its own genre.


Anna Faris legitimized the series to a certain extent, and when she left, the writers just went off the deep end. Things started to unravel to the point of lunacy in Date Movie, but there was still the mostly-genre parody only for romantic comedies. It was in the last four that things have just become absolutely out of control. Beginning with Epic Movie, there has been essentially no semblance of plot along with stupid parodies of recent films that had almost nothing to do with the genre. It's as though the creators of these recent ones just think people will laugh if you put a joke in with a reference to a recent movie, instead of creating context for the joke and a reason why their observation is funny in light of the original. There's no substance here, only recreation of moments from recent blockbusters.


Meet the Spartans starts with 300, but devolves into referencing Britney Spears shaving her head and including such terrible movies as Stomp the Yard and You Got Served, and borrowed its title from Meet the Parents, which has nothing to do with the haphazard, piecemeal, Frankenstein monster-like screenwriting that apparently occurred. It includes references to Nacho Libre and Snakes on a Plane, two at-the-time-recent but distinctly non-epic films. There's also an obligatory scene involving a Paris Hilton look-alike saying "that's hot" before being crushed by a woman falling from above.


The newest, Disaster Movie, might be the worst offender. In the trailer, it combines references to Enchanted, Hannah Montana, Sex and the City, Don't Mess With the Zohan, Juno, Hulk, Iron man, and Hancock. It even repeats the joke of Paris Hilton getting crushed by having Hannah Montana die under a huge rock and bikini-clad women getting killed. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but NONE of those are "disaster" movies. Hulk and Iron Man belong with superheroes, Juno and the Sex and the City girls have nothing to do with disasters, and those two are combined in a single scene which also contains the completely unfunny and unnecessary reference to Zohan. They are mocking jokes from films nobody even though were funny in the first place!

The Hannah Montana scene confuses me the most. It posits that the character wants fans to go out and buy "2 new albums" as she's crushed to death. Now while I understand that Disney has made a ton of money from releasing Hannah Montana albums, created a tour for those songs, released a film version of that concert, and then released a DVD of that movie of that concert in a Star Wars-like cash grab, but all of that possible commentary is completely lost in how lame the joke is. Couldn't it have been a list of what they needed to buy? It's just an unintelligent parody of what could be an interesting commentary. That's what is lacking all over the place, there's no thought put into these jokes to make them subversive or intelligent, they just are trying to ham it up and hope that people laugh.

The proper parody of disaster films is Airplane!; this is just a cruel joke gone horribly wrong. Check the reviews on RottenTomatoes: they're the worst I've seen since Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, the famed worst-reviewed film of all time on the site. The best to me comes from eFilmCritic.com : "So ugly, unpleasant and devoid of laughs that the notion of releasing a film with such a title on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is actually one of the least offensive things about it." Good lord does that sum up how it looks.

The box office can't sustain this, can it? There must be some semblance of intelligence in the American viewing public to stay away from the horrific downturn these films have been for our culture. Here are the numbers in domestic box office grosses, rounded to the nearest million:

Scary Movie - $157 million
Scary Movie 2 - $71 million
Scary Movie 3 - $110 million
Scary Movie 4 - $90 million
Date Movie - $48 million
Epic Movie - $39 million
Meet the Spartans - $38 million
Superhero Movie - $25 million

I'm thankful that the grosses have almost uniformly gone down, and that it looks as those this series could soon meet its end in the same way the Hostel films did, but we've gone on too long with all of this. There are fantastic indie films that have had total grosses less than the opening weekends of these disgusting excuses for film. Disaster Movie is predicted to make around $13 million this weekend, which is extremely high for how bad the film is. I can't believe that people would be so mindless that they would go see this steaming pile. That's not to say mindless entertainment doesn't have its place, but even in the category of mindless entertainment this ranks one of the lowest. Please, do me and everyone you know a favor, and do not see Disaster Movie or any subsequent film by these men. It's for our own good.

Take Two: Echo & the Bunnymen

Among my absolute favorite 80s bands is Echo & the Bunnymen. Ever since hearing "The Killing Moon" in the opening credits of Donnie Darko I've loved their music, and their 80s albums all have different feels to them. Their drummer Pete De Freitas died in a motorcycle accident in 1989, and on either side of that death they've released five proper albums (frontman Ian McCulloch left the band in 1988 and they released an album with a different singer which doesn't really count since they reuinited in 1997). In the interest of preserving my 1980s image of the band, I'm only going to pick songs from their five albums of the 80s. Maybe we'll catch up on the uneven records of the 90s and 2000s some other time.


Crocodiles
"Crocodiles" - I don't know why, but the title tracks of most of these albums are right around my favorites for each record. Maybe they actually titled their albums after one of the strongest songs, or perhaps it was just intriguing names each time. Either way, this song rocks out. It's a good calling card for their early style, straight forward rock with a little punk in there. They just went for breakneck speed here with McCulloch's gravely voice keeping up with the pace.

"Villiers Terrace" - Definitely a harbinger of sound experimenting to come. It's the most memorable song on the record to me, especially with all the drug imagery. McCulloch's lyrics got a little too weird towards the end of the 80s, but here he's very focused, very visual, very cryptic about the place he sings about.


Heaven Up Here
"Show of Strength" - Everything about this song fits together perfectly to me. The bass and drums are in tune with each other's movements, the guitar floats around and punches when it needs to, and McCulloch's vocals careen from a hoarse whisper to a bellow in an instant over the course of the song. The ending breakdown is fantastic as well.

"Heaven Up Here" - Probably my favorite track they ever did. The emptiness the sound disappears into on the track is awesome. The bass line thunders for the entire song, and McCulloch's wailing is in full swing here. Pete De Freitas' drums are going wild for the entire song as well. RollingStone rated this album their highest in their ranking of the Top 500 albums, and I think that's actually accurate. It's not their most popular album, but I really do think it's their most well-rounded and best.


Porcupine
"Back of Love" - A fantastic opening riff makes this another visceral Echo classic. This album was the hardest to record for the band, and the tensions that began here followed them for the rest of their career. This is probably my least favorite Echo record, but they still keep it together on a lot of these songs. McCulloch's screaming and the repeating guitar work really well in contrast, and the strings in the bridge give it an interesting change.

"Heads Will Roll" - Great acoustic opening, with a tinge of the eastern influence that hangs over the entire album. This album did feel a little bit too much like Echo trying to do the Beatles' eastern bits with English rock, but they rock harder to make up for it.


Ocean Rain
"The Killing Moon" - Ian McCulloch claims that this is a candidate for the greatest song ever written. I think it has enough to merit entrance to the conversation for the greats, with the fantastic imagery of the lyrics and the lush, fully realized instrumentation. Everything is timed perfectly in this song, and it comes out as though it took absolutely no effort. The sequence in Donnie Darko that used this song originally was to be scored by "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS, and I think that changing the song in the Director's Cut of the film weakened it a little bit. The acoustic opening and the first verse fit perfectly with that shot of Jake Gyllenhaal biking down a hill.

"My Kingdom" - Far and away my favorite Echo & the Bunnymen song. It's my favorite riff and my favorite lyrics of any song they've ever done. The record itself is only 9 songs long, but the final 4 tracks are just about the best things they've ever done. This is their most popular record, and "The Killing Moon" shot them to some degree of popularity, and deservedly so. McCulloch got a little bigheaded after this album, but for just a short time, they were riding high on a wave of critical and popular success.


Echo & the Bunnymen
"Bedbugs & Ballyhoo" - Echo mastered the slow build on songs like this. They're pretty much on autopilot for most of the song doing what they do best, but damn if it doesn't sound good. Don't try to make sense of the lyrics, they're nonsensical, but the blending sounds, especially when the saloon-style piano enters in the middle, are amazing.

"Blue Blue Ocean" - My favorite departure the band took in terms of their musical style. On this album they got much more into epic 80s synth-style sound, and this one was one of the few that worked for me. They've still got and underlying guitar there that's doing some pretty straight riffing, which is nice. The band was too far apart to survive after the recording sessions for this album, and McCulloch left the band after its release, leaving the band with the terrible idea of replacing their front man for one album before calling it quits for the rest of the 80s.


Honorable Mention Non-Album Tracks:
"Bring on the Dancing Horses" -This is pretty much the most covered song the Bunnymen ever made, and I personally really enjoy it a ton. McCulloch may have been hard to work with, and the rest of the band might have not gotten along really well, but they could write a single.

"Do It Clean" - This song can be found on the remastered version of their debut Crocodiles. You know how Bloc Party releases one-off singles in between records that are sometimes really awesome? Yeah, Echo & the Bunnymen did that twenty years ago with songs like this. Sure it's probably not the first time a band did this, but it's damn cool to hear awesome singles that have no album context to pay attention to sometimes.


There you have it, one of my favorite bands tracked in two songs per album. If you've never listen to them, maybe now's the time to try them out.

Roy Keane Making Moves at Sunderland

Right around the time I started following international club soccer seriously, Roy Keane left Manchester United to play for Celtic. I never really got to see him play, but man did I read a lot of his fiery comments on Manchester United and the game of football. He and Eric Cantona are the two most important commentators on football to me, and Cantona's "Joga Bonita" ad campaign remains one of my favorite commercials of all time.

Since taking charge of Sunderland two years ago, he's brought the team to the English Premier League and kept them from relegation in their first season. This summer he made an extensive effort to sign a lot of new talent. In the past two months alone he's brought Djibril Cisse on loan from Marseille, striker El Hadji Diouf from Bolton Wanderers, three players from Tottenham(midfielder Teemu Tainio, right back Pascal Chimbonda, and winger Steed Malbranque), and today landed West Ham's Anton Ferdinand.

Keane has a history of ripping players to shreds, and one of his more infamous tirades was against Anton's older brother Rio at Manchester United. It seems that Keane has some respect for the players he lambasted at Man U and Celtic, though, because he's brough a lot of cast off players from those teams into his squads in his first two years in charge.

I like the challenging personality Keane had against Sir Alex Ferguson at Man U, mainly because SAF likes to believe everything he says, does, and thinks is right. Keane looks to be developing a nice managerial career, and they've started their first games 1-0-1, so hopefully all the transfers will pay off in the end. While I really want to see Chelsea back on top in everything this year, it would be nice for someone other than the Big Four clubs (Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool) challenge for the title, a Champions League spot, the FA cup, Carling Cup, or just something major. We're in need of a shakeup in English football, and maybe Keane's approach at Sunderland can provide it.

I'm Going Radiohead Crazy: Get Your B-Sides Here + Take Two Update

You know that period of time after you see a band live where basically all you listen to is their stuff? Yeah, that happens to me really badly whenever I see a show. It's happened for The Hives, Interpol, Daphne Loves Derby, and most recently Radiohead. Last year, right after the release of In Rainbows, I tracked down a ton of Radiohead b-sides over at The Good, the Bad, & the Unknown. I think in light of my recent Radiohead binge I'd like to point people on over there to listen to the two b-side "albums" he made over there: Caisson Disease and Photographic Memory. My favorite things about his b-side collections are that the titles that are inverses of actual releases (e.g. Photographic Memory instead of Amnesiac) and the awesome custom album covers. Check them out, these tracks are just fantastic and are really hard to track down one by one.

And in the spirit of there being some "unofficial" albums of b-sides, I'll update my Take Two from yesterday.


Caisson Disease

"Maquiladora" - That guitar riff, man does that just epitomize the sound of the 90s to me. Hearing Yorke wailing over those dueling guitars is magnificent. I find myself wondering why some of these tracks didn't make the album, but then I remember that the albums are pretty much perfectly sequenced and pared down so there's no filler. These songs work as a b-side collection, but I wouldn't ever really want one of them messing up the images I have of the albums as they are.

"Coke Babies" - That fuzzed out ending is pretty sweet, and I love the semi-floating feeling of the guitar and the drums up until the fuzzing of the chorus. For a gruesome song title, its a pretty sweet sounding track, which is all the more sinister. Considering the amount of material Radiohead releases and the number of songs they hold over from session to session, they really do have an amazing back catalogue of b-sides from over the years. To be able to get multiple collections out of the b-sides is intense, especially when they form albums that dwarf other bands' actual recording output in terms of quality.


Photographic Memory

"Lull" - The shortest song I put on the whole list of Radiohead songs, but I love the guitar work here. All of these songs are culled from different sessions so it's a little hard to place these thematically with one record or another. Caisson is from The Bends-era, and Photographic Memory is from Ok Computer until after Amnesiac, so I'm not really sure where to place this song amongst the records, but I really like it on its own. After a couple more re-listens, the drums are fantastic as well. Short, sweet, simple, altogether not really the kind of track that Radiohead releases, but still awesome. It shows how well they'd do if they were just playing straightforward rock, but we know they're capable of much, much more.

"Talk Show Host" - In a list of my favorite songs of all time it's a all-out-brawl between this song and "2+2=5" for the Radiohead slot (I limit myself to one song per artist). The atmosphere, the guitar, the vocals, the lyrics, the Romeo + Juliet connection, everything just fits for me. The first time I listened to the song outside the film, my jaw dropped I was in so much awe of its beauty.


Okay, now I'm going to stop with the Radiohead overload and try to write something else for once. Just give me a few days or something.