Review: 140 (PC)

Holy wow, 140 is pretty neat, you guys.

This'll be a short review because it's such a short game. But it's a very good game. It is, to paraphrase another review that I read, a rare example of gaming minimalism done right.

The premise is made pretty clear in the surprisingly functional game trailer:

It's a platformer with an abstract, shape-y aesthetic. Already you're groaning. Stop groaning.

What makes it interesting is that all of the platforming moves and tricks are dictated by the beat of the background music (reflected cleverly in the thumping equalizer that makes up the game's background): platforms move, walls shift, and solutions emerge and disappear in time with the music, and as you make your way through the level, more elements are added to the background track to reflect the increasing complexity of the gameplay.

There are three levels in the game (and clever transitions from one to the next), and each level culminates in a "boss fight" of sorts, that changes the gameplay a bit (for example, one is sort of a top-down bullet-hell-style shooting game) but doesn't deviate from the game's rhythm-based challenges. These boss battles were jarring at first for the sudden fact that I wasn't playing a platformer anymore, but the new play modes are really just more riddles based on the rhythm of the background music. Once you figure out the beat, these "battles" are a lot easier.

If I have one gripe (and I always do), it's that at $4.99 the game seemed a little overpriced. I finished it in under and hour, it was awesome, and I went back and played it a few more times just for fun. It ends at right about the time it seems like it should, but yet the concept is really great and executed so flawlessly you can't sort of help but want more variations on the jumping puzzles, more clever bosses, more music. The fact that you don't get more doesn't leave a sour taste in my mouth as much as it just makes me hope that there's a sequel or something someday, but if you're pinching pennies, for the length of gameplay you get, you might want to wait for a sale. That said, if you're at all interested in music and/or platformer games, wait a month or so for the sale, and then buy it whether there's a sale or not.

HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO?

Is there anybody in here?

It's so quiet since I put Robocop, Captain America, Hercules, and Gipsy Danger outside to guard the door.

I guess I can finally post this, at least:

Blitzen Trapper Blows the Roof Off the Kenworthy, Hundreds Presumed Overjoyed

So, the night before driving the ten hours to Klamath Falls, Oregon for Lindsey's on-campus job interview, we remembered at the last minute that months ago we'd bought tickets for a show that Blitzen Trapper was playing in Moscow that night. We waffled on whether or not we should actually go at first, then decided to check it out, because how often do nationally-recognized bands come to town? By the end of the show, we were really glad that we did.

Blitzen Trapper has been one of those bands that's been hovering at the edge of my brain for a long time. Like Wilco years ago, then Josh Ritter, then Radiohead, and most recently Mike Gordon Band (and even Phish, honestly, at one point in my life), Blitzen Trapper is a band that I'd heard of, and whose songs I'd heard a few of, and whose musical pedigree I knew. I've had a suspicion for awhile that they were a perfect match for my musical tastes, but for some reason I never managed to "get into" them properly. When I get excited about a band, I tend to need to hear all of their albums and get obsessed with the minutiae of every single track for a few months to the near-exclusion of all other music. This detail-oriented approach is really satisfying on one hand, but on the other hand it makes diving into a band a big investment, and I think I need something to really grab me before I'm willing to get really obsessive/excited. Often, this "something" is seeing a band play live.

A band that's good live is usually infinitely more interesting to me than a well-done album (though not always). A band that comes out on stage, plays their hearts out, and are accomplished enough as musicians to not just regurgitate a record back at me in its entirety is way more likely to get me excited about digging into their catalog than anything else. For one thing, I like the idea of musicians who play for the sake of playing, not for the sake of crafting one finely-tuned and "perfect" manifestation of their songs and then leaving it at that and seeing how far they can ride that one moment of creation. This is probably ultimately why I like bands like Phish and Wilco so much: they're clearly playing for the joy of playing, and part of the result of that process is that it is a process. Sure, both bands put out great albums with great songs, but there are also many, many versions and live takes on those songs that have their own quirks and details that are worth digging into. It satisfies the weird, obsessive, collector's mentality I have when it comes to music while also serving as a tacit reassurance that the musicians enjoy what they're doing enough to keep creating and recreating as part of the process of writing and playing together.

Spoiler alert: Blitzen Trapper hit all of these buttons in about the first ten minutes of their show at the Kenworthy. They're clearly really talented, their music runs the gamut across a number of genres that I enjoy, and they weren't at all afraid to just rock the hell out for the sheer joy of it. The show was apparently their first back after a long period of being away from touring, and while some rust definitely showed (missed changes, lots of forgotten lyrics), it was such a small, intimate, and fun show, and the band treated the whole experience so informally that the roughness added to the show rather than subtracting from it.

I only knew a few songs (mostly from their album Furr, which is the only album of theirs that I own), but they played a few of the hits off of it as well as a lot of deeper cuts that were nonetheless immediately accessible and satisfying for anyone inclined toward some Americana/folk/jam/70s-rock/psychedelia mash-up.

One of the things I like best about the band is the lead singer's voice, which is somewhere between Bob Dylan (when he's folking) and Geddy Lee (when he's rocking).

They're also a lot more prog-rock in some respects live than I expected from the album that I'd heard, including a number of new, possibly-on-the-new-album songs that recalled Wilco's more abstract soundscapes to me, and I'm almost more excited now about what they'll put out next rather than what they've already put out. Here's a great video from the show of the new song "Heart Attack" (sorry, no embedding).

My favorite part was probably an especially spirited version of "God & Suicide" from Furr. There was also an amazing impromptu rock/psycho keyboard/harmonica jam at the end of some other song, but I don't know what song it was and there doesn't appear to be any video.

Anyway, it was an amazingly great show, not even considering the fact that it was in the intimate-but-with-great-sound local Kenworthy theater in Moscow, and we didn't have to fight for parking or worry about public transit to get there. The morning after, I also found that Blitzen Trapper has a huge collection of their live shows on Archive.org, and that many of the recordings or SBDs or SBD matrixes.

The takeaway here is that I'm going to be listening to Blitzen Trapper a lot more this summer.

I've rescued you all from The Phish

So, awhile back I started listening to and reviewing all of Phish's shows since their comeback shows at Hampton in 2009. I never really expected to stick with it for long, and really only wanted to listen to the Hampton shows again because I'd recently gotten CDs of them and was excited. This little "project" sort of exploded, though, and now I've done almost 30 shows and am almost finished with summer '09 in its entirety. This is good in a way, but I realized that it's also been pretty much dominating my blog and that there are actually a few of you out there that are still interested in reading about the other things that I intermittently blog about. In the interest of no longer scaring you all away with massive amounts of Phish-related posts, I've started Skyballs and Saxscraper, another blog-space wherein I'll post reviews of Phish shows and Phish-related stuff from now on. So you can safely check in on Defiantly, Maybe from time to time, and hopefully I'll be posting more regularly now that it's summer about life, and learning, and reading and writing, and all those fun things I like to overanalyze when I have free time.

Of course, if you want to keep reading my thousands and thousands of words about Phish's 2009 tours, now you know where to go. I've also removed the previous reviews from this blog and moved them all over to Skyballs and Saxscraper in the interest of completeness.

Also, it's suddenly summer on the Palouse today! Cheers!

Review: Phish MSG NYE (webcast)

Motivated by the teeth-grinding frustration of missing Phish's stand at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium this summer due to a work-related scheduling snafu (I had the tickets in my hand and everything), I had originally intended to just blow a bunch of the money I've managed to save over the last few years and go see the band at Madison Square Garden over New Year's to make myself feel better. It's long been a dream of mine to see the band in New York, playing their signature NYE run, and this year I was finally in a position to (maybe) realize that dream. Unfortunately, tickets were much harder to come by than I had imagined, and I couldn't actually afford to buy a plane ticket, reserve a hotel for four days, and pay StubHub prices for four nights' worth of shows. My backup-backup plan, then, was to watch all four shows at my house through the LivePhish webcast. However, Lindsey and I had much more fun in Montana over Christmas than we imagined we would, and as a result we didn't get back to Pullman (or anywhere with internet for that matter) until late on the 30th. Therefore, my backup-backup-backup plan became to download the first three nights of the run after the fact and watch only the NYE show through the webcast. It was the next best thing to being there even though it very obviously wasn't being there.

I've watched a few Phish webcasts before, and this one was of even higher audio/video quality than the ones I'd seen before. Streaming it over my computer while running the video through my 36-inch TV and running the audio through my fancy turntable-sound-setup was pretty much analogous to watching a concert DVD. Plus, it was oddly weird and fun to be able to pick up my guitar and jam along with Trey as he played in real time on the other side of the country. Weird. The only thing that really bugged me about the webcast was the price. For $20, I feel like I should get to keep the stream after I've watched it. Hell, that's well over the cost of most DVDs today, and yet you watch the show and then that's it...poof, it's gone. I feel like they should either drop the webcast price a bit ($10 or $15) dollars in the future, or keep it where it is or raise it slightly ($20-$25) and let you download an .mp4 version afterward or maybe at least give you a complimentary version of the show's .mp3 recording or something. I paid way less than $20 to see The Hobbit in 3D on an Imax screen in a huge theater (and the two experiences were nearly equal in length, if you're considering the price point from a quantitative rather than qualitative angle). $20 just seems like a lot. On the other hand, had I purchased all four shows (for the marked-down bulk price of $58) it wouldn't have seemed like a rip-off...after all, that's about the price of a ticket for one show, to be able to watch four shows in the comfort of your home. It was nice to be able to get up whenever I wanted to go to a bathroom with no line, to be able to go make a sandwich during setbreak and not worry about paying $10 for a cookie and losing my place at the rail in the process...

Anyway, the show.

The show itself was, it seemed to me, a fitting close to 2012, the best year thus far of 3.0 (and, of course, the only year of 3.0 in which I failed to see a single show). I was hoping to see some monster jams, especially after what I'd heard of 12/28 and 12/30,  but I wasn't really surprised that they didn't materialize. NYE is a three-set monster every year, but it's always more a celebration, a party, than a deconstruction of song or an abstract ambient meltdown. It's the one Phish show of the year that's entirely about fun, and not much else. And in that regard, it lived up to its own hype. It was a very fun show from front to back, featuring a lot of good song selections, some great antics, a few genuinely touching moments, and, yes, a few solid jams (though those who demand that their jams have to run over 20+ minutes to be worth anything will disagree, I'm sure).

The show opened with a cover of Ricky Nelson's "Garden Party," a song I wasn't familiar with, but fit so well with the Phish sound that as it started I thought maybe it was a new original. The lyrics were appropriate, referencing the (Madison Square) Garden party and featuring some unsubtle digs at the band's desire to keep playing what they want to play regardless of what overanalyzing bloggers might think of 3.0. It was the semi-playful "fuck you" to their detractors that Phish has always excelled at, and it was a good song to boot.

The first set was, predictably, largely song-based, and though I was happy to hear "Roses Are Free," nothing interesting happened for the first bit aside from some extra-clever Trey soloing in "Sample." Then the "Mike's" hit and things started to get good-weird. "Mike's" proper stayed within the usual boundaries, though Trey brought a little extra to the guitar-heavy jam, but it was the unexpected segue into "Walk Away" that really got things going. It's one of my favorite currently-popular Phish covers and it was neat to have it pop up in such an unexpected place.

I was a bit disappointed when, just as things seemed to be taking off, "Walk Away" fizzled out, leaving Mike's Groove incomplete (at least momentarily). Fortunately, the "Weekapaug" that came out of this rare mid-Mike's break in the action was quite possibly the highlight of the night, and more evidence that we don't necessarily need 20+ minute versions of songs to get some fascinating improvisation.

This version goes places in eight minutes that a lot of versions don't in three times that much time.

A messy "Character Zero" followed to end the first set, and then we were on to the second set, where the only real spaciness of the night would occur. Things started off excitedly (for me) with "Birds of a Feather" and the hope that its being placed in the first slot of the second set meant we might see a monster version. The band ended up settling on a pretty rote reading of the song, though, and then launched, unceremoniously, into "Ghost," their go-to NYE jam.

This "Ghost" was nothing stratospheric by any means (see the '10 NYE "Ghost" for an example of what I'm talking about), and on its own, it's just an average-good jam, but paired with the "Piper" that followed, it works as a single piece of music that's right up there with some of the band's better work this year.

I like the "Weekapaug" better because it's a little weirder; nothing really happens in the "Ghost" > "Piper" that hasn't been done before, but it hangs together really well and the minute or two of blissed-out ambiance that bridges the two pieces are easily the best part of the night, taken alone.

"Piper" ran right into "Light" which continued into "2001." Really, it's easy to imagine a "Ghost" > "Piper" > "Light" > "2001" set that runs for 90 minutes all by itself, isn't it? That isn't what happened here, but a guy can dream. Anyway, that second half of this segue-fest was a great time, even if "Light" was a much more straightforward reading than most of its other '12 takes.

The segue into "The Horse" was pretty unexpected and well-done, and it's always a treat to hear a decently-played "Silent in the Morning."

The third set was big on antics, of course, featuring "Kung" and then an actual "runaway golf cart marathon" that took place during "Chalkdust Torture" and "Tweezer Reprise." As usual (for me at least), it was hard to really understand what the point of the NYE gag was until after the fact; at the time it just looked like a lot of people on stage dancing and being goofy while the band desperately tried to play their instruments as ping pong balls rained down on them from the ceiling (Fishman was especially hilarious in this regard). There were no real musical high points in the third set, but again, that's sort of to be expected. The antics highlights for me were (for sure) the covers of "Fly Like an Eagle" and "Iron Man," and the acapella version of "Lawn Boy" was a unique (and thematically appropriate) way to end the third set.

Anyway, as I said, this was a fun show. Likely more fun to watch than it will be to relisten to a few months or years from now. There are a few legit musical highlights, but mostly it was just a fitting send off to 2012 featuring a lot of goofiness and solidly played, fun, danceable songs.

While I wait for my next chance to catch up with the band (likely in June, I hope), I'll be listening to and doing short reviews of as many of 3.0's shows as possible. I already gave 3/6/09 a relisten the other day and will have my (much briefer) thoughts on it up shortly. I've never really listened to much of '09 and '10 except for the shows I attended, so I'm excited to dig up the gems that I'm sure exist inside these often-maligned touring years (really, the 3/6/09 "Tweezer" is the fucking shit, and should probably be recognized as such).

Thoughts on Record Store Day from Someone Who Lives in the Desert

Apparently this is my first post in quite awhile. Huh. I suppose I've had a lot going on, what with finishing my dissertation and gaining super-secret doctor-powers and all.* But still. I hate to neglect ye olde blogge. I've actually been writing quite a bit in my new pitiful-for-normal-people-but-enormous-for-overworked-grad-students amount of free time: bits of songs, bits of poems, a new short-story-type-thing and a few nonfiction narratives...and that's not even counting the two essays I'm revising for (hopefully) publication. So yeah...lest the lack of blog-activity lead you to believe that I haven't been following through on my promise to write more: I'm writing a lot. But I'm also playing outside a lot, and cooking huge meals a lot. And those three things combined bring me as close to my ideal zen-puppy-like existence as I can rightly get.

So typing that into GIS made me aware that this is apparently a thing.

As you might have guessed from the title of this post, though, all that blather has fuck-all to do with what I want to write about right this second, which is my ambivalence re: Record Store Day. If you don't know what Record Store Day is, you probably just closed this tab and went across the room and threw on your favorite Third Eye Blind CD, or A-Ha cassette, or Kanye West iMusic thing-a-ma-jigger, or Native American ululation wax cylinder, or whatever the hell you listen to music on instead of vinyl. If you're still here, I'm writing specifically in response to this article, which I think pretty evenhandedly explains why I found it hard to get excited about Record Store Day this year.

In fact, now that I've linked to that article, I realize that all I really want to do is rearticulate the same points less articulately. Which is sort of pointless...but then again, isn't a blog, by definition, pretty pointless? Here we GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I don't have to explain myself to you.

So, Record Store Day. A day in which lots of brick-and-mortar, independent, and often financially embattled music stores attempt to attract new (and presumably repeating) customers once a year by getting in extremely limited selections of already rare and obscure vinyl and CD albums, singles, and EPs, and charging well over what "regular" vinyl albums, singles, and EPs would cost to the lucky few who actually get in line early enough in the morning to snag the rarest stuff while sending everyone else home dejected. Make absolutely no sense yet? Moving on.

Next, those who do get their hands on the rare stuff sell it on eBay for an inflated price, and many such albums pass from owner to owner this way for months or years, never leaving the packaging because to actually take the music out and, you know, listen to it would ruin the item's collector's value.

Better still, there appears to be no logical reason that this hipster-consumerist (hipsumerist?) holiday couldn't easily be executed in such a way that would actually entice more people to buy vinyl and frequent their local stores.

Instead, we have a situation in which:

1. Much of the music purchased on Record Store Day never even gets listened to in the first place.

2. Much of the profits made off of those rare pieces of vinyl and CDs never actually go to artists, or to record stores but instead to private eBay sellers.

3. Many, many people want to buy something, and yet there is a purposely limited supply for some reason, meant to enhance the specialness of record collecting, I guess.

4. Many customers are turned off from going back to small, local stores after having to wait in line for hours during their first-ever visit since the staff can't handle the demand RSD generates one day a year because they aren't set up for the indie rock equivalent of Black Friday.

5. Ultimately, the whole experience ends up replicating the stereotypes of small, independent record stores as nerd havens where people who aren't in the know get treated like ignorant Philistines and vinyl purchasing as a hobby only for people who are interested in paying fifty dollars per album and competing with other buyers to score the limitedest limited edition of everything.

"Fuck you for not being me!"

Tell me again why this was a good idea?

I'm all for getting people out to independent record stores. Moscow has a great indie store, Deadbeat Records, staffed by a bunch of great people, and they've thrown pretty excellent RSD shindigs the last two years. I went last year and poked around the "used" bin for fun, bought a few cheap singles, and then went home. I didn't even try for any of the limited stuff because, despite having called the store months early and had them order copies of four different albums for me. They simply didn't get them in, they said, explaining that you can ask the RSD mothership for whatever you want for your store, but the odds that you'll actually get it in stock (especially in Moscow, Idaho) are pretty low.

What's infuriating is that just at the one store I stopped in at, there were five or six of us customers ready to throw down around a hundred bucks or so each on new records, but because of RSD's manufactured limited-edition nonsense, that was five hundred bucks that our local store didn't get because they weren't able to stock any of the things that any of us big spenders had hoped to buy. I ended up spending my money on used climbing gear and like to think that my life was the better for it, but the whole episode just drove home how mixed a message RSD gives to the consumers that it's supposed to be romancing.

This year there was only one thing I wanted: Phish's first-ever vinyl release of their first album, Junta. I knew for an absolute fact that there wasn't going to be a copy at Deadbeat, so I just fished (hah) around online for a few days, then by the morning of RSD, when copies started popping up on eBay for $300, I gave up and went and did other things, resigned to the fact that there was no way to get a new piece of vinyl by my favorite band because of Record Store Day.

Which leads me to my primary suggestion for making RSD more consumer-friendly (and thus more record-store-friendly): cut out this limited edition bullshit and cater to people who just want to own and listen to music. Isn't that what buying music is about, listening to it? And isn't that supposed to be the draw of vinyl, that it sounds better? Do record stores want to encourage "record collection" or do they want to stay in business while disseminating awesome music to people who want to pay to enjoy it?

Why not just have a Record Store Day where lots of your normal inventory is on sale? People can still get albums by their favorite artists, and there's still an incentive to come to the store on a particular day, but it's just a price thing.

Or, better yet, why not have a Record Store Day where lots of new vinyl albums are released, but are released on a non-limited-edition basis? This is what has, ultimately, come to gall me the most about RSD. People will stand in line for hours and gouge each other's eyes out for, say, a new M. Ward 7 inch, and yet much of M. Ward's catalog of normal, non-special-release albums are more or less unavailable on vinyl unless you're willing to pay exorbitant prices for old pressings on eBay. It's frustrating to me that labels are willing to go through the effort of making goofy limited edition pressings of things like Feistodon while entire discographies of their best artists are begging for a normally-priced, normally-alloted vinyl release.

Take Phish's Junta for example. The pressing of the album that came out on Saturday was limited to 5000. Knowing both the Phish and audiophile communities as I do, I can more or less guarantee that a press four times or more this size would have sold out just as well. In addition, the band regularly releases "special" 7 inches like Mike Gordon's Moss Remixes and the Two Soundchecks single when most of its studio albums have never been released on vinyl, and the few that have are well out of print and can only be heard by people willing to pay upwards of $500 for one record. Why not participate in the next ten Record Store Days by releasing one studio album per year at a price that most of your fans can afford and in a quantity that won't result in pile-ups at the cash register and absurd eBay auctions? Such an approach would make stores a ton of money, get music into the hands of the fans that want to hear it, and get rid of all the manufactured drama that so many people assume is inherent in vinyl "collecting."

How does this not make sense? WHY ARE WE LIVING IN HELL

* The power that I gained was actually just a +1 to my Number Of Cheeses Combinable On A Grilled Cheese skill, which was already at 3 due to previous leveling up.

i'm a wheel

or at least i feel a bit like one.

i'm settled back into the writing nest at the moment, and have been for about 24 hours now, but this weekend turned out to be a pretty significant adventure (beyond even what i had expected).

way back when, in the days when i could imagine having free time, lindsey and i decided it would be fun to go see wilco a few times during their most recent west coast touring jaunt. two februaries ago, we took a weekend to catch them in both seattle and portland, and both shows were great, though at the time i lamented the fact that all wilco shows are more or less the same. of course, "the same" should be read "awesome", but i doubted the necessity of seeing back-to-back shows ever again. this time, though, one show was within a short driving distance of our friend john's apartment in portland and the other was a short distance from my own apartment, in spokane, and was taking place almost on my and lindsey's 3 year anniversary, at the spot where we'd met for the first time. it seemed imperative to go to both.

lindsey at the hult center.

we left town late friday morning, and did the usual pullman-to-portland commute, shooting down 395/82 and then through the columbia river gorge. we made a quick stop-off just outside of the city proper to pick up john (who was visiting a friend in eugene, where the show was taking place), and then it was on to the hult center. as always, wilco was stellar. the setlist was a bit obvious, and i was likely a bit crotchety from not having eaten since we'd stopped at burgerville in the dalles early that afternoon, but that was offset somewhat by the fact that we'd stumbled on to second-row tickets.


after the show, i'd assumed that after having been awake for a million hours and driven almost 9 of them, we'd just head back to portland and sleep. instead, (fortunately, as it turned out ) we got to meet up with john and his friend, and went in search of food and drink in post-midnight eugene. this led us to an excellent pizza/beer joint called (i think) cosmic pizza and reheated vegetarian slices paired with an excellent vanilla stout. from there, things became a bit of a haze featuring organic american spirits and a rather enthusiastic eugenean (?) who kept insisting that "the spirit of the 1890s is ALIVE!" and solicited smooches from all four of us (lindsey included) before disappearing into her apartment building. 

a pizza place with sriracha!

fortunately, john opted to drive back to portland, and so all i had to do for the next two hours was struggle to stay awake as the roadlights flashed by. i think we might have also listened to daft punk's discovery and kid a. upon arriving at john's apartment, i'm pretty sure i was asleep in less than five minutes. which was good, because there would be only a little rest for the wicked.

we woke up the next morning shortly after sunrise, but i was feeling pretty good. actual, legitimate sunrise in portland is such a rare thing that it's rather inspiring to experience. as such, i shook off my lethargy, forced lindsey to make me breakfast (women are for cooking!) and then settled in to work a bit on job applications and watch the city wake up.

it wasn't long before john woke up and gifted us with a second breakfast, and then we were off to bridal veil falls for a little (read: lot) of hiking.

lindsey being dwarfed by bridal veil falls.

our original plan for the day had involved a 2200 foot ascent to a place called devil's rest, over the course of a 3-or-so-mile hike, which we were then planning on retracing back to the parking lot. this hike would take us past some pretty amazing northwest coast basalt cliffs and accompanying waterfalls.

as might be expected, though, the lure of a entire day in which there was no school-related work to be done tempted us into a bit of laziness and we'd gotten on the road a lot later than we'd originally planned. as a result, we were only about two-thirds of the way to devil's rest before the sun began to go down in earnest. it became obvious we weren't going to make it up and back before dark, and hiking long distances over a dramatic elevation change in the dark sort of takes a trip out of "fun day hike" territory and straight into "possible survival scenario" territory. so we decided to turn around. and then we decided to run.

lindsey and becca in front of another waterfall.

 not for any necessary reason, mind you. we're just idiots. some of these idiots (read: me) were even wearing non-hiking shoes which were not happy about supporting my ankles in the least bit. as i type this, my toes are asking me "what were you thinking?!" over and over in the language of PAIN. nonetheless, breathlessly shambling down 1500 feet or so of altitude over 2 miles at a good jogging clip while jumping stones and exposed roots in near-darkness is a good way to make the best of a shortened hiking day.

upon our re-arrival in portland, we settled in for a typical john-style repast, featuring much more home-cooked food than could have been eaten by eight people, and store-bought vegan chicken wings from a portland restaurant called fire on the mountain that were quite possibly the best thing i have ever eaten in my entire life. for serious.

i don't remember much of the rest of that night, because the lack of sleep from the previous few days caught up with me in a huge way after dinner. i vaguely remember passing out (quite literally) from sleepiness shortly after the huge meal, and waking up briefly later that evening to say goodnight to everyone before dropping off again.

lindsey, john, and becca at a lookout point above bridal veil falls.

we woke up in the morning just before sunrise (due to an early bedtime) and got on the road by 10am, which opened up the whole day for an awesome, meandering drive along the north side of the columbia gorge on WA-14. this was amazing until about the time we reached the dalles bridge, when the road suddenly became covered by fog and stayed that way until we got to richland. eaten lunch at a great mexican restaurant in richland before finishing the drive back to pullman, though, put the perfect exclamation point on our first leg of the wilco-trip.

after an interlude of about 16 hours of frenetic work and worry and such, we left just before dinnertime on monday to get to spokane in time to eat and catch the second show. our dinner-location of choice was the fascinating (if you're an urban-spaces geek like me) steam plant grill in spokane, which had severely jacked up its prices since our last visit but still offered great food and an excellent vanilla bourbon stout. for the show proper, we were once again in the second row, which i know have found makes the show much easier to see, but less easy to hear. we had john stiratt's bass in our faces the entire night (not necessarily a bad thing), and the setlist was a lot more varied, and there was a seven-song encore.

by the end of the trip, i'd spent a little more time, money, and energy than i'd really planned for, but it was all worth it. after this, i'll likely be chaining myself to my writing desk for good until this dissertation is finished, so it was a nice send-off to freedom, and if wilco keeps up their habit of visiting the pacific northwest only once every two years, the memories will definitely make the wait for the next go-round more bearable.

i cover a gillian welch song. in my office, using a shitty webcam. hooray!

here's what i got up to last night between writing breaks:


if you prefer, here's gillian welch herself doing a much better job of singing the song:


and just for shits and giggles, here's the tragically-cut-short ryan adams cover that led me to discover this song in the first place:


also, i found out today that if you type "phish" into youtube search and filter by "videos longer than 20 minutes", wonderful things happen.

RIDESHARE - Phish 2000.05.23

I can't seem to get enough Phish lately, and the Phish shows indulge me by continually being awesome.  It's a vicious cycle.

I'm digging through a lot of solid '92-'93 stuff right now, but about a week ago I tumbled to a great '02 show and this amazing '00 one.

Phish 2000 shows, when they're good, hit that spot where it's almost like a 90s-era Phish live mixtape: you get some early 90s shredding, some mid-90s technique, some late-90s funk, and a few Farmhouse tracks jammed out in jaw-dropping ways that only seemed to happen before the hiatus.  This show is one of those.

"AC/DC Bag" sounds like it could have come straight from a '92 show, and it moves right into "Wilson", and then, just when you're settling into the groove, out comes "First Tube" to surprise and otherwise stimulate you.

Take, for instance, the "Weekapaug"-less "Mike's" that comes out of "Ya Mar" and goes into "Simple", then "It's Ice" before finishing up the run with "When the Circus Comes".  Not only are these segues effective, that combination of songs is just bizarre.  Just reading it makes me want to listen again.

Pretty much the entire second set is this way too...and the band jams throughout in a way that's fitting to the setlist...oftentimes you can almost hear them reaching to figure out a way to connect such interestingly disparate material.  And that's a good thing.  This weird mix doesn't work 100% of the time, but I'd rather listen to a show like this than a perfectly played but paint-by-numbers show any day.  I should eat this show.

RIDESHARE - Wilco 2004.11.13

This review is mega-short because, honestly, I listened to this like 2 weeks ago and after everything that's happened since then, I barely remember it.

Here's the setlist.

Most of the main set was standard 2004-era Ghost tracks, until the end which was a particularly stellar "Poor Places" > "Spiders" match-up.

Also of mention was the first encore's rare "Another Man's Done Gone" and "Candyfloss".

High quality show, but nothing revolutionary if you've already heard some 2004 SBDs.

RIDESHARE - Phish 06.11.1994

setlist here.

this is the only full show i've gotten to in the last couple of weeks, though i've gotten partially through a pair of fantastic phish shows (2000 and 2002, surprisingly) that i'll review as soon as i find the third disc of each and listen to it.

this show is one of the treasured june '94 phish run, arguably one of the finest months of live music ever done by anyone ever in the universe of history for all time.  infinitely.

while i didn't like this show as much as i did the 06.18.94 show, it could still be one of the not-best-ever-but-still-best parts of the best-ever month of 6/94.  make sense?  let's move on.

this setlist was definitely more interesting.  it starts off with some pretty standard rockers ("wilson", "chalkdust torture", and an amazing version of "you enjoy myself").  YEM segues into "rift", and then things really start to pick up.  as usual, "rift" live is a little spotty, but "down with disease" and "it's ice" are standouts of the first set.   "tela" is an interesting addition; a song i hadn't heard in awhile and that put a smile on my face.  but, you know, it's not really known for its jam pyrotechnics.  "stash" was a solid, if standard-to-great rocking jam to end the set on.

the "2001" > "antelope" opener was a great way to start the second set.  "flufflhead" is one of my favorites, and this was a pretty standard version.  the rest of the second set and the "suzy" encore is when things really started to take off and never really let up.

the selection of songs is the attraction here.  there's a great variety of songs in the setlist, but not really any terribly exploratory or strange jams to enjoy...most of the show is flat-out rock-jamming, so if that's your thing you'll love this show.  it goes without saying that this sort-of-criticism should be considered along with the fact that this is a june '94 show, which means that even if most of the show is straight-up rock, every single note is perfect, all the harmonies are spot-on, and every solo is perfect.  so, while i found the 6/18 show more interesting, this one is still better than 90 percent of any other live music (and any other phish) that you'll ever hear.

ever wanted to hear a big beat mashup of phish and the dead?

i've been a little bit obsessed with this set of remix/mash-ups that i found on soundcloud the other day. all of it's pretty much great - the guy has a great ear (?) for this stuff.  if you're in a hurry, though, just check out "a gentle hell" (a trippy version of wilco's "hell is chrome" mashed with thievery corporation), "just break" (jurassic 5 and radiohead), and best of all "freezerflowerfluff" (phish's "tweezer" and "fluffhead" mashed with the dead's "china cat sunflower").
 Bonnaroo Booty by mopo

RIDESHARE: Wilco 04.28.2000

like all the other millenia-era wilco shows i've listened to lately, this one was a grower.  at first i spent awhile nearly driving off the road while screwing with my CD player's EQ (the recording, though a SBD, is not necessarily the best, and the vocals are really low in the mix with the odd combination of drums and keys being preeminent).  on top of all that, "candyfloss", which is the first song and one of my early-era wilco favorites, starts about 2/3rds of the way through the song.  what is it with wilco recordings lately and cutting off the first half of the opening song?

i was considering taking the disc out and playing something else until "i must be high" came on.  it was a really interesting version: energetic and folksy, but with that unmistakable post-summerteeth electronic touch.  this was a theme throughout the show.  some of the best moments of this show are the times when you get to hear a.m. or being there songs sounding more like yankee hotel outtakes than their original versions.  another main set highlight was "hotel arizona", hands down my favorite song on being there, recreated into a wholly different animal and yet still just familiar enough to be fascinating.

this band sounds so different than the raucous noise-jam band of even a few years previous.  while they're clearly still willing to experiment on stage, they do so with a little bit more patience, and ultimately their sound is better for it.  take, for example, "how to fight loneliness", which gets a few little instrumental jams throughout the song.  while it might have been "experimental" for the wilco of '97 to scale this quiet, introspective song into a flurry of feedback screams as it neared its end, this wilco peppers the song with quiet but complex instrumental interplay that's just as impressive but that suits the tone of the song.  when every single song doesn't end with everyone screaming and guitars catching on fire, it makes the songs in the set more distinguishable and thus makes the show in general a more nuanced experience.

anyway, one of the "loud" highlights, as usual, was "someone else's song", played as a metal dirge.  the main set closed with "misunderstood", and most of the double (triple?) encore was mermaid avenue songs.  so if you're not a fan of those albums, the second half of this show might be a wash for you.  i really dug it, especially, as usual, the "hoodoo voodoo" closer.

if there's one gripe i have about this show it's that, for all the summerteeth material in the setlist, none of the songs were played like summerteeth songs.  maybe this was a choice on the band's part, or maybe they simply just didn't have the equipment, but when you hear a song like "can't stand it" (or "candyfloss", or "i'm always in love", etc.) without all the little flourishes that are present on the album version, the song tends to sound less artistically different and more just flat.

RIDESHARE: Phish 06.25.1995

one more review to dredge up from memory from last week, and then i'll be caught up to what i listened to yesterday.  then i can go back to blogging about other things that actually matter.

RIDESHARE is my 2010 version of my old Madden 2003 franchise posts...

this '95 show (setlist here) was a pretty fascinating meld of the technically precise, no-holds-barred '94 sound and the more experimental spacy '96 sound.  like, in all the best ways.  first of all, the show starts with pretty standard but solid "ya mar" and "AC/DC Bag" (when does "AC/DC" ever really sound any different, anyway?), then immediately jumps into very early versions of "taste" and "theme from the bottom", both of which are instructive and exploratory.

to address my own setlist bias for a moment, i'm basically just in love with the first half of this set.  while i could generally take or leave "AC/DC bag", "ya mar", "taste", "theme", "if i could", "divided sky", and "i didn't know" in one set, even if they were terrible versions, would make a killer set in my opinion.  and these are far from terrible versions.  one of my favorite phish guilty pleasures are the noodle-guitar-and-piano jams at the end of songs like "if i could" and "squirming coil", and this "if i could" brings that jamming in spades.

this show has another great "scent of a mule" with some page pyrotechnics, though "maze" is, well, it's just "maze".  i've never really understood the appeal of that song.  the "mike's" > "why don't we do it in the road?" > "hold your head up" > "weekapaug" string is probably the highlight of the show.  again, i'm biased because i love the "mike's" > "weekapaug" duo as much as i love anything phish, but this version of "mike's" is particularly gnarly ("gnarly" in this case meaning "super dark guitar-led jamming").

overall, this show wasn't on the same level as some of the shows i've previously reviewed as far as setlists go, or as far as playing (there was a lot of technically great jamming, but a few of the songs went on for upwards of 10 minutes without actually really developing any themes or differentiation).  however, there were some standout moments (middle of each set) that would be worth another listen.

stun the puppy, burn the whale!

one of my favorite moments (if not THE favorite moment) of the phish shows i've seen so far...just found some youtube videos of it for the first time.

the last song they played at blossom this past summer was a great version of "squirming coil", which ended, as you can see below, with page alone on stage playing a piano solo.  then, he finished, the spotlight went off, and the lights came up for the night.  great encore.

two versions of the video, neither of which are amazing quality, but they both do the job :)

RIDESHARE - Phish 06.06.1996

so after my near-transcendent experience with the '94 shows, i decided to bounce around a bit, and first went back to '96 (i also listened to an '02 show last week, but misplaced the last disc, so i'm sort of waiting to find it before i write anything).  this '96 soundboard is a "page show"...you know, one of those shows when, time and time again all of trey's guitar pyrotechnics are completely overshadowed by page just ripping off one absurd keys solo after another.  i like these kinds of shows, but if you're one of those fans who only enjoys hours of guitar noodling and nothing else, you probably won't like this one.

sEtlIsT

usually, a show opening with "split open and melt" is not a good omen for me.  i don't know what it is about that song, but i've never really enjoyed it.  the hook repeats too many times, and the jam at the end is usually too structured to really break into anything interesting.  that said, this was a decent version (i.e. better than bad, at least) and the segue into "poor heart" was pretty unexpected and hilarious.  this was page madness moment #1.  "runaway jim" and "funky bitch" were par for the course, which is to say, awesome.  then there was "theme from the bottom", which was page madness moment #2, followed indirectly by "scent of a mule" in which entire warehouses of keyboards and pianos must have been melted to fine ash.  the first set closed with a pretty by-the-books "highway to hell", which prompted a horn jam by yours truly.

part of the draw of this show for me comes from the fact that billy breathes has some of my favorite phish songs on it, and here you get to hear a number of those songs in early form, before years of touring sort of formalized the jams that build around them.  "theme" was one of those, and the second set brought extremely raw versions of "waste" and "character zero".  they weren't the best versions i've ever heard, but it was interesting to hear them so differently.  the second set had few standout-type moments otherwise, but was overall a great set of tunes.  the show closed with page rocking one more time on "ya mar", and then a cover of hendrix's "fire" that had trey sounding more like '92 or '93 phish than '96.

RIDESHARE - Jeff Tweedy 02.25.2006

well, hello there.  it's been about thirty-five years since the last rideshare...exam-writing has intervened, and lindsey has been going to tri-cities with me often lately, which means that 35-minute "tweezer" jams don't go over as well as when it's just me in an empty car.

these reviews are actually from about a week and a half ago, and so much has happened since then, i don't really remember the content of the shows that well, or even what a "CD" is, really.  nonetheless, i'm going to take my best shot at reviewing mr. tweedy's show at mandel hall in chicago, for which the setlist can be found here.

i'm getting to be really fond of starting out these cold, cloudy, morning drives with a mellow wilco or tweedy show, then following it up with a blistering early phish set on my drive back out of the canyon of heat-induced despair otherwise known as tri-cities (despair only because the temperature is like 20 degrees higher there than in pullman due to elevation droppage).  anyway, this tweedy show really hit the spot.

it was a great soundboard, and the songs were a great mix of the ones that you can hear in similar incarnation on the sunken treasure dvd (which you should buy if you're a wilco fan at all) and a lot of songs from a ghost is born.  hearing really clean, precise solo acoustic versions of tunes like "muzzle of bees", "spiders" and "theologians" was a treat.  there were even some surprises among the expected, more "folky" choices in the set: "one by one", "(was i) in your dreams", "bob dylan's 49th beard".

though the third set followed the usual procedure for this particular tour: usually nels and/or glenn joining tweedy onstage for a few songs, the songs for this particular show were a bit of a surprise.  getting to hear rearranged versions of "in a future age" and "dash 7" was maybe the highlight of the whole show.

overall, a great combination of a unique setlist, solid sound, and of course a solid performance makes this, for my money, almost as good as the aforementioned sunken treasure audio companion for a collection of solo tweedy tunes.

ye olde recordings have finally be re-upped!

though my hunt for an easy website design tool and time to make an AWESOME personal/professional website continue to fall through (it's been what, 2 years now?), i've finally found a convenient and non-stupid way to re-up all of my old sessions and records for download.

all hail mediafire!

okay, now i seriously have to go write my exams.

mint medley session available for free download and consumption!

so in defiance of my coming exams, i found myself staying home saturday afternoon and setting up a recording space in my bathroom.  i'd been toying with the idea of using the bathroom to record any guitar-based songs lindsey would want to put on her album, but i'd never actually tested the room to see what it sounded like.  so, i decided to take an hour or three and see what a song or two of mine sounded like in there, sung from different parts of the room, sung with the mics shifted around, with the shower curtain open or closed, etc.

by 8pm i had recorded 14 songs.

so, i thought it would be fitting to post them online as a soundcloud session before i disappear into the abyss for three weeks.  there aren't any new songs here (i'm mostly working on poems right now, and usually those flesh out into songs eventually, but none have yet), but there are a lot of new covers.  here's the whole setlist:

1. Angel From Montgomery (John Prine cover)
2. Damn Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains) (Ryan Adams cover)
3. Dusty Roads
4. The Melody
5. Albuquerque (Neil Young cover)
6. Bob Dylan's 49th Beard (Jeff Tweedy cover)
7. Palace
8. Ripple (Grateful Dead cover)
9. Forget the Flowers (Wilco cover)
10. Hey Sue
11. Sample in a Jar (Phish cover)
12. Box Full of Letters (Wilco cover)
13. Better to Be Loved > Jam > Millie > Shelter From the Storm (Bob Dylan) > Millie
14. Via Chicago (Wilco cover)

and here's the soundcloud widget:
 Mint Medley Session by lazyblazers

RIDESHARE: Wilco 02.01.1997

this one got off to a less-than-auspicious start.  i had chosen the disc because it was marked "07.02.01" (i mark CDs in euro-style dating for ease of sorting), and i wanted to hear an '07 show because i love the rawer versions of the sky blue sky songs.

so imagine my surprise when i popped the first disc in and it started in the midst of "misunderstood", then continued through five more being there-era songs.  it took about that long for me to realize that i must have forgotten to put the leg on that first "0", making it "97" instead of "07".

so here's the set i got.

much like the phish show i just reviewed, this one taught me the error of my ways, in a sense.  i generally don't like bennett-era wilco that much, and have never understood why so many wilco fans insist that the late 90s were the peak of the band.  this might be because i really just don't like jay bennett's playing (which is a rant for another day), but for whatever reason, while i occasionally like to put on early, "raw" wilco, i come away with the impression that, for as fun as they are, they really aren't that good.

this show was good.

like i said above, for some reason "misunderstood" cuts in about 2 minutes into the song, and actually the first few songs are a bit unlistenable because someone keeps fiddling (either the sound dude or the taper) with the volume levels and tweedy's voice is nearly inaudible.  however, things pick up.

this show's version of "that's not the issue" is one of those versions where it literally sounds to me like all the members of the band are stoned out of their minds and banging on their instruments erratically and totally failing at staying in any time signature or scale; yet, at the same time i'm a little afraid that they're just playing in a scale or something that i'm not familiar with and i'm not cool enough to get it.  anyway, this song was sort of a disaster.

everything else is pure being there wilco.  loud, clashing guitars, wild alternation between screamed and whispered lyrics, and more feedback than you can shake your pickups at.

things really start to get off the chain when the band finishes "passenger side", only to launch immediately into a "punk" version of the same song.  after that, madness ensues, including two versions of "box full of letters", three uncle tupelo songs ("we've been had", "gun", and "the long cut"), which oddly sound like three of the most well-rehearsed songs of the night.  the last few songs, including the final "dreamer in my dreams" run around 10 minutes apiece simply because the band never stops banging on guitars, drums, and piano long enough to stop the song and move on to the next one.

this show had an undeniable energy to it, and underneath that the band showed a real ability to not just devolve into screaming and strumming - the nuances of the songs often still come through despite the volume and the reverb.  the focus here is being there; if you love that record, you'll love this show.  i actually want to go back and listen to the record this weekend now, thanks to this show.  though i doubt i'll ever think than any wilco is better than '06 - present wilco, i see the appeal of this kind of show now.  i might grab another one from this era to review for next week.