Category — Music Much?

The world is unhurriedly ending. Not because of global warming or the poor economy, but rather the lack of original comedy films. Let’s take a look at the past 5 years. For the sake of this writing let’s consider comedy films that are re-watchable and sustain or grow in their humor and amusement. “Timeless” is the word oft used to describe these movies.

Mainstream or not, there only 2 recent films (as of the past 5 years) that come to mind.

• Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Hot Fuzz
• David Wain’s The Ten

You may argue that there have been plenty of great comedies recently. Really? Watch them again. Then watch them over again. If you are not bored, then I apologize and am wrong. Now compare them to everlasting films like Office Space and The Big Lebowski. Do the recent films stand up through re-watching or are they simply cookie cutter recipes that all copy each other with cheap penis jokes and unfunny situational comedy that lasts longer than 25 min?

This recent plague in lack of originality has been infecting music for years much as it has for comedy film. Sure the “digital revolution” is amazing in the ground covered and leaps forward. Truly original music falls through the strainer here and there, but I have been less than excited as a whole for quite some time.

Melt my face, make my ears bleed, challenge me, get me exited. Please makers of music, I plead that you leave this trend of cultural bankruptcy that is hipsterdom behind. In your effort to stand out in originality and non-conformism, you are only conforming to each other in a comedic display of hypocrisy. Your music reflects this, you all sound similar and take from each other and just run in circles.

The few that break free are forgotten or fall/fly too far above the radar to be cool.

I would like to say that Bill Callahan’s new album Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle hit me like a slap to the face the first time I heard it, but I can’t. I was more intrigued than anything… So I listened again, and again, and yet again. I think that I played it around 4 times in succession after hearing it for the first time.

It’s not that it’s complex, but rather the opposite. The string arrangements sound like some that you could hold in your hand that could fly away in a strong breeze. Callahan’s lyrics are bold and clever. It reminds me of the first time that experienced The National. At first it sounds simple and easy to digest. But upon closer look, you can see the spark of genius keenly shroud in plain sight.

The album reaches an apex at track 5 – Too Many Birds. I think that John Darnielle does the song justice on his blog by simply pasting the lyrics along with the hyperbolic sentence: “Someday you will brag that you were around when stuff this good was being written.”

The last song Faith/Void takes what I would call a bold risk. Even in popular music, the issues of theology and modern day society seem taboo to discuss outright. Callahan repeats the line: “It’s time to put god away” over and over again. For some reason it doesn’t sound menacing or preachy as it does when read on a page. He sings/speaks the line as a mater-of-fact type instruction a parent would tell a child to put their toys away.

Though I only recently discovered Bill Callahan I was shocked to learn that he has been making music for almost two decades under the name Smog. I don’t know how I never came across his work before, but I now feel overwhelmed with a full discography to sort through. The tunnels of music appreciation are long and winding, and you never know where your heading or where you going to pop out.

So I recently installed Amarok 2 on my Ubuntu machine. I like what I’ve seen so far. Now that I’ve had a taste of Songbird, I feel that I reserve the right to demand a lot from my media player. To start, Amarok’s new interface is pretty. It’s simple, not too cluttered, and fun to use. I’m not crazy about the mock multiple desktop thing they have going on. It just feels like they couldn’t decide on what people wanted, so they just gave us the option to move a very limited selection of tools around in a very limited space. This is something that Songbird got right. I want to feel like I can customize the layout, the look, and the feel of my player. This never bugged me before in Amarok 1.4; rather all I looked for was functionality.

As Songbird has been maturing, so has its ability to do whatever it is that I require, except for making active playlists. This is something that Amarok has always done right and has done so again. I’m not one for making playlists, but I do like to queue up albums to play consecutively without constant interaction with the player. A sort of “set it and forget it” (please don’t sue me Ronco). This brings me to another quam I have with Amarok 2. What is the difference between adding something to a “queue” and adding to my playlist? From what I can tell, adding to the queue adds to the end of the current playing track, and adding to the playlist adds to the end. I don’t know why this bothers me so much, but I just think it’s unnecessary and just confuses the user.

Besides this, Amarok 2 flies compared to the previous version. The iPod support is also miles ahead of its predecessor in terms of support and speed. I used to have to set aside part of my day in order to add new music to my iPod. It’s now a simple click to transfer. (Though I do wish Amarok could do a temporary trans-coding for unsupported file types for IPod transfers, but hey I’m using Linux with an apple product. Linux dorks can’t be choosers).

I think as it stands now, I’m left in that purgatory between media applications. One better for active listening at my computer (Songbird), and the other stronger suited to setting music to play while I occupy my time with other things (Amarok 2).