Jeff's Best of 2008

Since everybody likes to read a "Best Of" list at the end of the year, I thought I would throw my hat into the ring and create one myself. This isn't going to be a list focused on only one thing, such as music, but I'm going to try to fill it with things that I thought were great about 2008 (which rhymes). However, I'm going to start with a cd. Also, the numbering is arbitrary and does not indicate any ranking, other than the order in which I thought of them.

Portishead - Third

Portishead's first cd in over 10 years was, I thought, particularly interesting and challenging. So, really, it was just like the Portishead of 10 years ago. It's nothing that is '10 years in the making' or anything along the lines of Guns N Roses Chinese Democracy that had been worked on over that long hiatus. The album is definitely rooted in the past year. It has a definite Portishead sound, long spaces between notes and sounds. Sometimes mechanical. Lots of samples. But, I thought it also took those staples and did something new with them.

The song 'Machine Gun' is a good example. It takes a sparse arrangement and mechanical sound and pushes them so that the drum line is so obviously mechanical that you automatically think of a factory and production line. The vocals sound as if they are recorded in the largest space possible and only the chill of the higher notes is left. The only time the song sounds organic, and this is a little paradoxical, is at the end when an electronic keyboard line enters.

Now, if only they would tour North America.

Here's some samples.

Click to hear Machine Gun

Click to hear The Rip

David Byrne Concert

Lacey and I went to see David Byrne at the Lyric Opera House last Wednesday. We both really enjoyed the concert. It was great to (finally) hear Talking Heads songs performed live, which all sounded excellent. The musicians were supported by a trio of dancers that moved around the stage in a variety of styles. Usually, I'm not all that interested in dancers, but I thought they did a great job of adding to the performance instead of being a distraction or just looking silly.

Anyway, here's a video from the concert to check out. I didn't take this, just found it on youtube. I thought the way the video is distorted actually made it look pretty cool. Unfortunately, there's some people talking, so the audio gets spoiled by that. This is from another earlier show.




Here's another from the show we saw.

Amanda Palmer

Here's two videos from Amanda Palmer's (The Dresden Dolls) new solo album, Who Killed Amanda Palmer. Watch the first then the second.

The Dresden Dolls

Most of you know that Lacey and I love The Dresden Dolls. Here's a video of them performing a cover of Pink Floyd's In The Flesh. We saw them do this in Baltimore in December. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. They are great performers and whenever they do a cover, it just seems like they bring so much to whatever song it is. Plus, this one features Brian (the drummer) singing, which is pretty rare.

Getting Started

So, this will be the first post on my blog. Obviously, I'm a little late to the party on the whole blog scene. I guess you could say I was just waiting for all of the trendy people to move on to the latest thing. Plus, I don't how dedicated I can be to this. But, I'll give it a try.

Now, first of all, I guess I should introduce myself for the one person reading this that doesn't already know me. I'm a guy in my late 30's, who's married to a beautiful woman (Lacey), with two school-age children. I think I'll leave it at that, otherwise, why read any more posts?

Since I just finished a book, I'll start off writing about that. Today I finished Little Children, by Tom Perrotta. This was made into a movie, which came out last year. I enjoyed both. The movie sticks pretty close to the book, although there are minor characters that are more fleshed out in the book than in the movie. Both Lacey and I actually read his latest book, The Abstinence Teacher, prior to seeing the movie. We both really like it and once I realized that he wrote Little Children, I wanted to read that, too.

Anyway, the basic plot is that a man and a woman meet at a playground where their children play and have an affair. Obviously, it's the characters that are important in this one.

To me, the title refers not to their children, although all of the characters' lives are centered on children, but how their lives are affected by events in their childhood or at least at a younger change. And it's not that they had great tragedies in their childhood that 'made them what they are', but that how in their mundane lives, they are reminded of certain events (a remark by a former boyfriend, things that happened in college), and that these events influence their decisions now. This was one of the things I liked, because I could identify with these "blasts from the past" popping up and coloring how I look at things now. There is also a character that is a sex offender that was treated in a realistic way and I think this lends an interesting twist to things.

Now, I'll leave you with a link to some concert footage of Talking Heads circa 1980. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g8lFmsCXhg