Walter Must Die.

2.28.11

3:13 pm

First, you don't know Walter and you never will so don't fucking judge me.

He must die.

He ought to die and, if I were given a sharp hammer and three minutes in a windowless room with him, I'd be happy to take care of things.

But I can't.

Thanks Obama.

Next, as everyone suspected, Reznor and Ross won their Oscar last night, and as a result, people have been interviewing him.

The only nugget my obsessed little mind centered on was what he said regarding the How To Destroy Angels LP: "Have to mix it, early fall, most likely."

Originally (and obviously I should have known that anything relating to release dates coming from Trent Reznor should be taken with a huge amount of salt), Reznor had slated the new album for January 2011. His fans, by this point, understand that when he says "soon" he means "within the next year", "very soon" "within three months" and "really really soon" "within the next day". But when he gives a month? That's different. I'll try to not Cake out as I've done over the past three years or so, but just letting you, the Internet, know that I am bummed about the potential six month wait that myself and fans are in for.

And, right along those lines, it was reported that TMBG's fifteenth studio album (and first adult album in more than a year) was due out in April, the fifth to be specific. Recently, the band spoke up and said that "an album preview EP" would be out in April and that the album itself was now scheduled for July.

July.

As in, four months from now.

Last week the new Radiohead album came out. It's called The King of Limbs, it's eight tracks and 38 minutes.

Personally, I'm a two/three/four-tracks-an-album guy when it comes to Radiohead, usually discarding the rest for whatever reason (although Thom Yorke's The Eraser was awesome), and this new one is in the same place as their previous ones.

I mention this because of the recent disturbing trend in popular music where time between albums is getting longer and the albums themselves are getting shorter.

Is this the artists' way of antagonizing pirates?

"You want to steal our music? Fine, here's 40 minutes for the next few years, steal THAT you little shits."

That's healthy.

Surprised and disappointed that Haley whatshername from True Grit didn't win for Best Supporting.

Have to see Melissa Leo in The Fighter to know whether or not I should continue feeling this way.

Also, apparently I need to see The King's Speech.

That thing fucking swept.

Anyway, along with Oscar Fever, I caught Dead Space 2-orrhea.

I bought the game when it came out (on January 25th) and have held off playing it, despite hearing people rave about it, for fear I would disappear into it.

I'm about 85% done with the game after two play sessions, about five hours each.

I'm not even done with it and I'm already looking forward to playing it again.

They have improved upon everything from the first game and executed perhaps the most brilliant revisiting of a previous area I've ever encountered.

And it looks and sounds fantastic, just like its predecessor.

In particular, there's a segment where you are manually realigning a bunch of solar panels while floating over Titan and you can just stop for a moment and look down at Jupiter...absolutely stunning.

Plus there's a new enemy which is, basically, an exploding baby.

So that's rewarding.

I should be done tonight unless I have something tomorrow morning that restricts me from finishing up.

Oh, and Will, it might not be the exact same as Diana's, but Chris followed her directions to the letter last night and made some amazing arroz con pollo.

It really does have to do with not touching the rice it seems.

How odd...

And speaking of Will, massive congrats to him on shucking off the boring humdrum chains of the Google Lunar X-Prize and stepping into the high class world of luxury, recreational space travel.

One more time.

LUXURY, RECREATIONAL SPACE TRAVEL.

Unless space disappears in the next few years, Will will actually be in space before he's 33.

So, he's pretty much taken care of.

He's going to space.

What else is there?

I suppose he could finish the Tall Like Paul screenplay...maybe even while he's in space...he could use that pen that writes in space that the US government developed.

Or a pencil.

Whichever.

In other BFFLOLROXORZ!!!1! news, I'm super-stoked, once again, to read Phil's latest novel, Blood From The Mountain.

Or Mount.

Whatever.

I admit that I am even more stoked for his March novel, the second chapter in his Grind Show series.

I dug the hell out of the first.

In fact, it might be my favorite thing he's written, certainly my favorite novel of his.

Christina has yet to read it and, although we celebrated our 11th anniversary on Friday and over the weekend, we won't make it to twelve unless she reads the first Grind Show in the next few weeks.

See Phil? THAT is how dedicated a fan I am.

I want your word babies.

I also want you to write my biography.

Maybe in April?

call me

**************************************Finished Perdido Street Station tonight.
Man oh man does that guy China know how to fuck over some heroes.

Whoagina!!!

5.27.10

3:55 pm

Quite a bit of music rambling today, so, if you're deaf...heh heh heh...the pillow talk was a bitch...Jesus...

Anyway, you might want to tune out.

First off, it turns out at least one of my predictions for the new eels album, "Tomorrow Morning", has come true as they posted the cover art and tracklisting last night.

The album will have 14 tracks.

And, something about the tracklisting makes me think my vision about all the songs being spares is also true.

Whereas the majority of the songs on "End Times" (the one about E's personal apocalypse with this girl) were all about how horrible life is without this girl and how there's no point in living anymore and how could this happen to me and no one should be happy and HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN TO ME?!, the titles (haven't heard a note of the new one, but that's why they're called predictions and not postdictions) of the new one are ridiculously optimistic and twee.

Titles like "Spectacular Girl", "I Like The Way This Is Going", "In Gratitude For This Magnificent Day", "Looking Up", "This Is Where It Gets Good" and "I'm A Hummingbird".

Now, I mentioned these song titles to Chris last night, and she suggested they were probably tongue-in-cheek, as E tends to be all the time, but, based on the simple, straightforward nature of the last two albums (of which this one is, again, the third and final installation), I fear they might be just as straightforward and just as deep as their titles.

And that blows.

See, it blows because, way back in 1998, eels put out "Electro-Shock Blues", which was all about E dealing with the personal apocalypse of pretty much his entire family dying and his being left all alone in the world and it was fucking amazing.

It was bittersweet, thickly layered with all types of great melodies, instruments, styles and, the best part, it wasn't a huge downer, it had hope laced throughout.

And it wasn't obvious.

It's truly a fantastic work.

And, at the end of it, pretty much everyone, including E thought he was going to kill himself.

Then, he released "Daises of the Galaxy"; sonically, it was (mostly) airy and simple, acoustic guitars and not much else at times, the lyrics, however, were as double sided as ever, this album was about hope and the future, but it addressed that there might be trouble on the horizon: you just never know.

The overall feeling was about how things are getting better and he's going to be okay.

ESB was him dealing with the tragedy and Daises was him moving on with his life, scarred, limping, but looking toward the future and what it might hold for him.

So, you see, he's done the "crushing apocalypse/things might get better" album set before, but better.

People were actually comparing "End Times" to "Electro-Shock Blues".

I'll agree, as long as we're talking about the fact that both are written in and regarding dark times in E's life, but that's it.

Listening to ESB is like living parts of his life, seeing into his soul and watching him relive these tragedies as they happen in his mind, again and again. Hearing his inner-most thoughts and then watching him put on a stone face and make snide comments about some aspect of this, trying to distract people from what he's really feeling.

Listening to "End Times" is like trying to have a conversation with someone while the drunk guy at the end of the bar is telling you how shitty his life is now that's he's divorced; some times he's mumbling, sometimes he's crying, sometimes he's yelling, but the whole time you wish he'd just shut up or change the script.

So, as I said before, I don't hold a lot of hope for "Tomorrow Morning", as I fear it's going to be a pale, wispy shadow of "Daises of the Galaxy" just as "End Times" was a pale, wispy shadow of "Electro-Shock Blues".

The only up side if I'm, sadly (I obviously don't want the album to suck...), right, at least this trilogy of errors will be over and E can move on, although I doubt we're going to see another period of productivity from him for a while.

Man, it's always a catch 22: you get a great album every five years or three sub-par ones in a year and a half.

I've just had a realization: As impatient as I am, I would rather have a great, instant classic album every four years or so than a meh-fest once a year.

I do not want all my favorite bands to become Prince.

Okay, next, I was alerted today on Beck's site that he guests on the new Tobacco album, "Maniac Meat".*

Tobacco is what I shall call "dirty dick dance music".

It's the music you put on when you've been in your house for about a week without a shower, your entire body is covered with a light sheen of grease and you've gone out of your mind.

You'd hear it at a strip club where the girls, while very attractive, are all missing toes or wearing prosthetic limbs.

And you can't turn it down because there's semen on the knob.

THAT is Tobacco.

I dug their most recent album, "Fucked Up Friends" very much because I'd never heard anything like it. It was so well done and compelling and filthy.

What they're doing to music should be illegal.

The new one isn't as great as FUF (although I'm not totally though it yet), but it's still hard not to want to slip my penis into the pockets of strangers while listening to it.

I highly recommend it for the next time you're having sex in a bathroom stall.

And finally, because we're all angry and tired here: turns out the thing that HTDA was teasing us with was its involvement in Wired's first iPad issue.

In the (non-electronic) paper version, there was an article about how the band constructed their song "The Believers". If you got the iPad edition, you could hear the song while reading the article.

Oh Trenty sure loves his technology!!!!!!

Minutes after this came out, someone had hacked the thing and put the mp3 up on a torrent site.

Unlike what I had expected, it does NOT sound very much like the other two tracks from the EP OR even all that Nine Inch Nails-y (except for the marimbas).

Some Beck-ish aspects about it at times, actually.

It sounds like electronic ceremonial Aztec music.

One could cobble a video together with selected scenes from "Apocalyptico" and scenes from episodes of "Big Love" that take place on the Compound, maybe some Waco footage thrown in for that "real" edge.

It has a hypnotic beat which works very well with the cultish, mantra-like lyrics.

The vocals are husked, barely audible over the clanging, by Mariqueen, and, even more barely audible, breathed by Reznor.

It's not my favorite track off the EP (of which they've put out half, in various formats, in the past month), but that doesn't worry.

This is a fun little project and (duh) I'm looking forward to hearing the full album from these folks.

All right, I think that's about it.

Now I'm going to sit quietly and try not to commit a hate crime on the most annoying person in this universe.

WISH ME LUCK!!!!!!

LOLLERSKATES!!!!!111!!1

KTHXBYE!!!!!

  

*Maybe one of the best album titles I've heard all year, and the album art goes right along with it.

You Want Dark?

Not only does this give Mariqueen street cred with NIN fans, but they're newly weds.
Nice.
"The Spaces In Between" music video by How To Destroy Angels.

Let's Dissect A Song!

5.4.10

4:22 pm

Okay.

This morning a track from the forthcoming self-titled Reznor, his wife, Atticus Ross side project, How To Destroy Angels, was put up on Pitchfork.

It's generated abut 30 pages of chatter on the official nin.com forums, obviously.

And why should I be left out of the judging-by-its-covertude?

I shan't, that's whyn't.

In a nutshell, some of it sounds like parts of a few NIN songs, namely "Me, I'm Not" and "Corona Radiata".

It also reminds me of a Rasputina song called "Zodiac".

The lyrics are...well, not great, and the only vocals are done by Mariqueen who does a husky, female whisper like you've heard before in everything with a husky, female whisper.

That said, it isn't bad.

It's good, and there's a lot of interesting layers there that float in and out of perception depending on how much attention you're paying to the song.

One such layer is an awesome deep, oceanic sounding guitar effect that nails the water imagery xmax.

There is, however, an odd mixing of metaphors when they throw in a line about "looking out a window at a swarm of locusts" right before a line about "keeping one's head above the tide".

Then again, the song is called "A Drowning", but the album and band are called How To Destroy Angels, so maybe there's some religious content in store for us.

Unless it's a tide of locusts.

Which doesn't work for me, personally.

Overall, it sounds like a "Ghosts" track with lyrics.

Whatever; Trent Reznor is making new music.

And pretty soon he'll make more.

You can hear the new track here.

Eet's...In...My...BEH-LEE

4.30.10

4:22 pm

It's days like this I am happy I do not have allergies...

...he said as his eyes swelled shut...

I was in Starbucks earlier and decided to do something.

I am going to become a regular at as many Starbucks as I can and then get friendly enough with one barista is each that I can invite them to hang out some time.

I'll make it very clear it isn't a date or anything, just, you know, hanging out with some friends.

Then, I'll see how long it takes these dozen or so people to realize that they're ALL Starbucks baristas.

'Twill be quite the minde fucke.

On a completely unrelated note, I want my apartment to look like the last 20 minutes of "Alien". 

Seriously though, if you have a self destruct sequence going off, why would you trigger strobe lights?

That has to be the most disorienting thing possible!

I suppose the people making the ship were like, "okay, we have the really calm, grandmotherly voice telling us the ship is about to blow up...let's juxtapose that with some klaxons and disco lights, that ought to make this challenging."

What assholes.

Assholes or not, I did crack open the goddamn NINE disc Aliens Quadrilogy thing last night and watched "Alien" for the first time in a while.

Turns out I must have seen this movie quite a few times as I remember pretty much everything from it.

Really amazing movie though.

The space ship looks so perfectly spaceshippy.

It isn't that plain, white super futuristic set up or the cheesy 50's Buck Rogers motif either.

You look at it and think, "That's the inside of a space ship."

The acting was great too.

Just so natural and understated.

The two engineers constantly squabbling over their share of the money adds a lot.

The whole thing was just so well done, probably because of the cast.

For a sci-fi movie from the 70's that is a tight line up.

The Hobbit is a fucking android with milkblood!

What more do you want from anything, let alone a movie?

I also dig the total lack of exposition.

It's clear enough what's happening without everyone sitting around and telling you.

Way to go Ridley, you poncy Brit, you.

And all that trouble over ONE alien.

And the alien itself?

Jesus.

Is H.G. Geiger dead? I hope not.

All his designs were amazing.

I think the reason the alien is so effective is because it's one of the first times we've seen an alien being that isn't the tall, gray, big eyed humanoid or just a bunch of tentacles.

These things look like nightmares.

Only real problem with this movie, and this is totally my fault because I've seen it so many times (apparently), is the predictability.

Uh oh, crashed space ship.

We should investigate!

No, you shouldn't.

It's some of the same horror movie logic that makes people with no cell phone signal and one fading, flickering flashlight between them decide not to find a pay phone to call the cops and to descend into the boiler room/Ritual Slorgg Pit of the Church of Cthulhu's Infinite Maw alone.

At least in "Alien" they have that directive from the Company to sort of cover that.

I'm going to claw my way through the rest of these as soon as I can although I have a feeling that the others aren't going to be a great.

Oh, and Cake is returning to New York in September.

So far Lisa, Kathy, me and Lisa's friend are going.

I'd highly recommend it if you like faux country snark rock with a five to ten minute lambaste about the environment and the Evils of Ringtones.

I really hope this show heralds a new album.

I'm getting rather sick of finding one tidbit of new album (usually consisting of "we're playing guitar today!") news every month floating in a sea of links to how we're destroying the planet.

As long as they release, say, four more albums (including that live album that they delayed indefinitely) before we exhaust the Earth's natural resources, I'm good.

Here's to Cake: the saddest bastards in rock.

5:40 pm

Something popped up on the NIN Hotline (the most official unofficial Nine Inch Nails news source) about a new project Reznor is working on called How To Destroy Angels.

The 6-track, self-titled EP is slated for "Summer 2010" and, at the moment, looks to be a collaboration between him, his wife, Mariqueen (who used to be in a terrible pop band called West Indian Girl, not sure if she was just a back up singer or lead singer or writer or what but it's pretty bad), Atticus Ross (12 Rounds, the Book of Eli score and the last few NIN albums) and Alan Moulder (super producer of all typesa shit, including the last few NIN releases).

Right now, there are two video clips on the web site, one showing Mariqueen playing a very NIN sounding synth thing over a very NIN sounding beat and one showing Atticus (in a shirt with FRILLED SLEEVES!!!!) playing a simple bass line over some very NIN sounding background noise.

In fact, this sounds like instrumental bits of Ghosts, Year Zero and The Slip being retooled, but, then again, these are 40 second long clips and Reznor has proven he's rull good at bucking expectations.

I just hope this isn't a "isn't my wife a real good singer, everybody?!" thing.

That would be a bummer.

To be fair, he's never really done anything like that and most things he collaborates on turn out to be great and pioneering in some sense or other like Antichrist Superstar or Niggy Tardust, so I'm not worried.

He's also going to be doing some collaboration with Gary Numan (unless HTDA is part of that, although him, his wife, Atticus, Moulder AND Numan would be quit a lot of cooks for a 6 track EP) which should be pretty amazing based on Numan's past few albums which sound quite a bit NIN-esque.

Then there's the instrumental track he contributed to Tetsuo's latest film, "The Bullet Man", the Wave Goodbye tour DVD/Blu-Ray, Year Zero 2, Ghosts V-VIII and, finally, the ultimate reissue of 1999's "The Fragile".

Pretty excited to see what's on that one.

It was originally set for a March 2010 release so...yeah, but as long as we get it before 2011, I'm stoked.

Honestly, I'd rather he not tour for a while and just make music, be it Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor or collaborations with people.

Touring costs me sooo much money, worth it or not.

I think I'ma order me some tacos for dinner.

6:31 pm

I ordered beef lo mein and egg rolls instead of tacos.

SO FICKLE.

BE THE APPETITES.

OF A GOD.

**********************************
This afternoon the Conservatory Garden smelled like nutmeg and midtown smelled like chocolate.