Heading Home Today

All the Way to New Jersey, All the Way to the Garden State

Quick trip to Maine comes to an end today. We've been here since Sunday, and it's been a great, summery few days: super hot temps, sailing, walks on the beach, rides on the midway, and a sudden thunderstorm that knocked out the power.

We're gonna hit a diner for one last lobster roll / chowder combo for the road and then it's back to reality. Fortunately, our summery reality is quite similar to the reality up here. As usual, I've got a few post-vacation resolutions. They include taking advantage of my work-from-home status and my proximity to the beach to make this "The Best Summer EVAR."

Lots of cool stuff coming up starting this week, including David Byrne / St. Vincent at the Basie, Death / The Everymen at La Poisson Rouge, and the last-ever Feelies show at Maxwell's. Maybe I'll see you out there. Stay cool.

Album Trailers

I Don't Get It

Divine Fits have realeased the second trailer to their album A Thing Called Divine Fits which is due out on August 28th via the excellent Merge Records.

What the heck is going on here?  I'm not talking about the person moving beneath the Jiffy Pop foil in the actual trailer.  I'm talking about album trailers in general.

This feels like a new thing to me, but I know it really isn't.  Word of mouth, viral marketing has been around since before the Internet.  Now, though, put out a trailer or reveal the track list (uh... whatever), and it flies all over the web thanks to people like me.

The first time I saw one of these, it was the trailer for Titus Andronicus's The Monitor, put out by XL Recordings.  At the time, I thought it was cool because it appeared kind of homemade and it was pretty obviously tongue-in-cheek.



Then, The Decemberists did a few, I think, for The King Is Dead (Capitol, this time).  They were professionally shot and showed the band working on the album in some Oregon farmhouse.



Those are just two examples, but I've been seeing these things for different albums a couple of times per week.  Now, we have this trailer for Divine Fits.  The clip is referred to as "A Film by Alexa Gerrity" and looks great, but I'm not sure how much it tells anyone about the upcoming album.



I'm not trying to knock any of these bands here.  All of them streamed or made available some other way actual songs from their albums prior to release.  Given that Divine Fits features Spoon's Britt Daniel and Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner, I'll almost certainly buy the album on the day of its release.  I'd just prefer another single or maybe a video (directed by Alexa Gerrity, even!).

I don't know.  Maybe it's just another case of my oversensitive cooldad / hipster hype alarm, but I just find the whole album trailer thing a little nonsensical.

And don't even get me started on "So-and-so reveals track list."

The Decemberists, We All Raise Our Voices To The Air (Live Songs 04.11-08.11), 2012

Album Review

Apparently, the Decemberists are a polarizing band.  I’m in the “huge fan” camp, so I never realized this.  But frontman Colin Meloy’s singing voice, the band’s hyper-literate, baroque, often violent songs, the names they assign to their tours, and their prog-rock opera about a shape-shifting fawn, his love, and his mother the tree appear to rub some people the wrong way.  This record is not for them.  Like most live albums, this one is for fans.

Culled from several performances on the band’s 2011 Popes of Pendarvia World Tour, the album includes live renditions of songs spanning their entire career.  Castaways and Cutouts favorite “Leslie Anne Levine” gets the treatment right alongside recent songs like “Calamity Song” and “Down By The Water.”  In some cases, especially those including heavy audience participation, I prefer the studio versions; but there are some great performances here.  It’s especially nice to hear “The Crane Wife 1, 2, and 3” in order – all 16 minutes of it – since it was broken up on 2006’s The Crane Wife.

I saw the Decemberists twice during 2009’s A SHORT FAZED HOVEL tour for The Hazards of Love and once, early on, during the tour covered by this album.  I loved every minute of all of those shows, and this album brings some of those moments back for me.  But I can definitely see how some of Meloy’s stage banter and the audience sing-a-longs may have a “you really had to be there” quality for non-fans or for those who weren’t at the shows.

For me, the Decemberists have always been about the songs.  Album-wise, I think I’d say that I’m a Picaresque guy, but that’s only by a hair.  The Decemberists are one of the few bands whose discography I can happily put on shuffle while not feeling like I’m missing out by not listening to the album “the way the artist intended.”  We All Raise Our Voices… does a nice job of shuffling the band’s discography all on its own; and in that way, it’s really nice to have.