Because I just bought this album, think it’s pretty good, and want to share with you their weird video.
Category: Music
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Teddypocolypse!
I like this song, even though every time I hear it I think I’m listening to Dr. Who for the first several bars.
The video is interesting. The best part starts about 3/4 of the way through.
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Cruxshadows
The Crüxshadows have a new single coming out!
What, you’ve never heard of The Crüxshadows? Well, you must not be listening to Darkwave music. I confess that I, myself, do not listen to Darkwave music, with the exception of The Crüxshadows. However, they produce some excellent tunes which I’m more than happy to slap my ears on. In fact, they currently reside in the top 5 of our Most Albums by the Same Artist category for the house.
We’ve seen the Cruxshadows most frequently at Dragon*Con, proud sponsor of the Crowd Surfing Stormtrooper, seen at left. We are looking forward to seeing them again, this Labor Day weekend.If you buy any of their albums, buy their most recent one, Dreamcypher. That is their strongest complete album to date. Not that they don’t have treasures in the others. There’s good music all around.
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Digital Archiving
An article in today’s NY Times about the lack of comprehensive digital archives (due to expense) reminded me that I’m behind on my job of ripping all 400+ or our music CD’s.
We probably have 10% already residing on our various music directories, now I have to do the rest. It’s March 11th. We’ll see how long it takes me.
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Dragon*Con Review: Miscellaneous
Part V of an n part series. See here, here, here, and here for others.
Lots of stuff, I’m telling you TONS of stuff, goes on at Dragon*Con. You can party almost 24 hours a day on the planned activities alone! If you happen to be bringing friends (or meet new ones) you can fill that bit of time between 6:00 AM and 10:00 AM with anything your heart desires. We danced ’til 3:30 on Saturday night, and I gamed until the same time on Sunday, after which I went down to the concerts! (Friday I collapsed early, but I needed to rest up for the remainder of the Con)
Saturday night we saw the Crüxshadows, an energetic goth/darkwave band that we like. I, personally, don’t find them to be that inspiring from a musical perspective, but their shows are great, and if they ever get a U.S. tour date around here, we’ll go. So far I’ve only seen them at Dragon*Con. Jenn is psyched because she hugged Rogue, the lead singer, a man with wayyy too much energy on stage. I don’t have to guess how he stays so thin.
Other things I did this weekend: I went to a session with John Ringo, Sci-fi Military author extraordinaire. He was a very engaging person to listen to for an hour. He was wearing a kilt, along with half of the rest of the guys at the convention.One drawback of going to listen to authors is I always want to run out and buy their whole published works. John was no exception.
In the exhibit hall, one of the groups that showed up was the company Chessex, who sells dice, amongst other things. I should have taken a picture of their dice table, it was freaking huge! A friend bought a dIV, which if you understand dice lingo (6 sided die = d6, 8 sided die = d8) means the die has a I, II, III, and IV on it. They were also selling a d5 which had five non-equal sides (typically, you’d roll a d10 and divide by 2 to get a d5) and they swore it was accurate due to the way the corners were mitered. I’ll stick with my d10’s.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster was spotted at Dragon*Con this year! I was touched by her noodly appendage.
Hotel elevators are evil creations of a sadistic being. During the con, elevators were generally hard to come by, and if you tried to get up or down during the periods between sessions, good luck. All this pales compared to trying to check out of the Hilton on Monday with six people’s bags, from the 18th floor. It was so bad that people I was on the elevator with had gotten on going up at the 8th floor, traveled all the way to the top, and were on their way back down.
We made two trips down the stairs before I decided this was useless and went looking for the service elevators. Next year, it’s service elevators all the way, baby!
I did not understand the people who resided on floors 5 and below who would use the elevators. Just couldn’t be worth their time.
Lastly for this post, Dragon*Con TV! The programming and “commercials” and bumpers alone are worth the cost of entry to the Con. My personal favorite is the spoof, “The Simple Life: Ensigns” set on the Starship Enterprise. “I hope they teach me how to use the Force.” Hee hee.
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Jeff Greene
My phone rang this afternoon with a wrong number. As my habit is, I typed the number into Google to see who was calling me. It turns out to be Jeff Greene, a composer and bassist originally from Jonesboro, GA. I’ll have to keep an eye on his schedule and go listen if his group ever gets down to Atlanta.
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Wow
Holy crap this kid has a voice.
We watched all of American Idol this year and this kid gives them all a run for their money
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Liz Phair at the Roxy
Jenn and I went to the Roxy Theater last night to see Liz Phair in concert, with Matt Pont PA opening.
Starting with Matt Pond PA, they were quite good. I liked their music enough to buy the album on the way out the door. Haven’t had a chance to really listen to it yet, though. The way home from the concert last night was filled with that magical ringing of the ears.
As for Liz Phair: Well, let’s start by saying that she’s a hottie. She must have spent ten minutes getting into her jeans before the concert and she knows how to play the guys in the audience. I imagine that she practices the hip-swivel thing she does, and it’s much appreciated. She is very easy on the eyeballs.
The concert was a lot of fun. As I said, she knows how to work the audience and the feeling of the show was congenial. There were starts and stops during the set and for all appearances it seemed that she was making it up as she went. She started one song in a key that the rest of the band objected to, so they stopped and argued about it for a minute before starting over. The band played for about 1.5 hours and then had a four-song encore.
Muscially, it was good, but not great. The instrumentals were excellent, but Ms. Phair needs some vocal exercise. Perhaps she’s feeling under the weather, but her range was at least 25% less than I’ve heard on her albums and she wasn’t very solid during the concert. The first song, which was a solo acoustic song, sounded like she was gargling rocks and I was glad that the quality of her voice picked up during the show. However, there were some songs that she just couldn’t manage, “It’s Sweet” being the worst of the lot.
Overall, it was a good concert; a lot of fun with good music. This is the first show I’ve been to in a while where I wasn’t behind some 6′ 2″ person with big hair, which was nice. Instead I was behind four jail-bait teens who, despite not really getting into the majority of the music, had glorious fun belting out all the songs with really filthy lyrics. Hot White Cum was their favorite, followed closely by Fuck and Run.
Conclusion: Liz Phair is a good show.