My baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster - two great big humps and then I'm gone...

It's now been well over a month since I drove up from Orlando (after my Universal vacation) to Atlanta to see Grinderman at the Variety Playhouse. The holidays and my own procrastination got in the way of me doing much blogging. It was an amazing experience, though, so I do want to tell you all about it!

The second I found out they were coming, I made arrangements to buy tickets. I woke up the second they went on sale and bought them. And after that, the event sort of got pushed to the back of my mind. But, as it drew closer, I did get really excited.

Grinderman is the new(ish) project of Nick Cave, of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds fame. This band departs quite a bit from the style of the Bad Seeds, and it honestly took a bit to grow on me. I'm probably not the target demographic for Grinderman's music. But after several listenings, I learned to love it and now I find myself frequently listening to their two albums while I'm in the car.

I wouldn't say that Nick Cave is my idol or that I have a celebrity crush on him or anything weird like that. But, I do admire him. More than any other artist. Ever. I have a huge amount of respect for the man and all the work he does. In addition to being a musician (since 1973), he is a songwriter, an author, a screenwriter, and an actor. He has also done several lectures. The man is not only talented, he is very intelligent and very eloquent. I am just blown away by the work he produces in each field he has attempted. So, having the opportunity to see Nick Cave live in itself was amazing to me.

Grinderman produce a far heavier sound than that of the Bad Seeds, complete with dirty-old-man lyrics, and though I can get why some people say that Grinderman is a throwback to Cave's days with The Birthday Party, the two bands really are apples and oranges. Both are great, but both are separate entities and it was very easy to see that in live performance.

Anyway, the night of the show, I ended up going by myself. I met someone in the front row and chatted to him for much of the show. We both seemed to be in awe that we were actually standing there. Before the show started, security kept telling everyone in the front row to keep the area of the stage in front of the monitors clear (there was no press area between the crowd and stage, because photography was not permitted). However, I wasn't quite prepared for Nick Cave standing directly in front of me, occasionally brushing me/stepping partially on me with his huge shoes, or towering over me with his huge, lanky frame.

From the very beginning, I was impressed. These guys are pretty old - Cave is now 53 and Warren Ellis, his right-hand man, is 45 - and they still put on an amazing show. They had so much energy and were so into every single movement they made, every note they produced. It was one of the most amazing things (not just concerts) I have ever seen.

I wish I had enough words to really do justice to the experience, but I don't. They were playing in (I think) Nashville the following night. And had I not had obligations at home, I definitely would've made the drive. It was that great.

The only photos I've seen from the show were taken by a fan. There was one fan chosen to be the official photographer at each show. Here are a few of them, taken by Jeffrey Shipman. You can see the rest over at grinderman.com under "images".

So, I guess in closing, my recommendation is to check out the albums and to see the band live if at all possible. I think they're done touring in the U.S. for now, but future tours may occur. I know I'm hoping for a new Bad Seeds album and tour - it would be nice to see both sides.

That's it for 2010. On to 2011! May the beginning of this new year suck significantly less than the first half of 2010.

I'm mildly irritated, but not by Black Friday, but we'll talk about that too.

A few days ago, I got a friendly reminder e-mail from Borders (the book store) telling me that my rewards earnings would expire the next day. So I figured I would redeem them and buy a movie or two. We don't have Borders stores in the area, so I had to order online. I pondered my choices and finally selected two items. They were in my cart and all I had to do was check out. After many error messages, improper page loads, and three and a half hours of waiting and wishing borders.com would explode in hell, my order FINALLY went through. This was very frustrating, but in the end, the mission was accomplished, so I thought I'd just forget about it. And then I got another e-mail from Borders yesterday.

It reads:

"Hello,

We are reaching out today to our most valued customers to inform you that we received a huge response to our recent reminder for Borders Rewards members to redeem their $10 in Bonus Bucks. Such a huge response in fact, that the Borders.com customer experience was impacted. If you were not able to redeem your $10 in Borders Bonus Bucks online, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Please look for additional exclusive rewards and incentives throughout the Holiday Season.

Thank you for your patience,

Mike Edwards

CEO, Borders, Inc."

Now personally, after much frustration and time-wasting, I made it through. But this is the dumbest customer relations letter I have EVER seen. Mike Edwards, this is what your letter should have read:

"Dear Borders Customers who give us tons of money each year,

Our site is completely inadequate and non-functional. Fuck you, though.

Mike Edwards

CEO, Borders, Inc."

It wouldn't have been such a slap in the face if you didn't send an e-mail to everyone telling them, "omg go use your rewards coupons RIGHT NOW or else you will lose them forever!" But the fact that you were unable to anticipate the sheer inadequacy of your own site (which is actually pretty miserable to use on a normal day) before you sent this mass e-mail and then, instead of correcting the situation after you realized you messed up, just telling your customers, "It's too bad that we fucked up" just kind of blows my mind.

And now every time a new Borders coupon shows up in my inbox, which is typically at least once a day, I feel so much irritation due to the past offensive e-mail. There's not much I can do about it aside from ceasing to give them my business. But it is what it is.

ANYWAY...

Today was Black Friday. I haven't gone out to actually compete for wares in a few years and I didn't want to today because I've basically been feeling like shit lately. But then a few days ago, I saw a list of fun, limited issue records that were coming out. Among them was a Grinderman 12" which I absolutely had to have. And I didn't get. There were only 500 sent out. My local store got two and neither of them were attainable. However, my BFF across the country scored me a copy, so it's all good. I picked up something for him at my local store, and two things for me. One was a fairly not-in-good-condition copy of The Cure's live show at I-Beam (San Francisco, 1981) - the sleeve has some pretty hefty damage and the record appears to have one or two surface scratches, but we'll see how it goes. I'm not a super serious collector, so I don't care *too* much, but if it's really a total wreck, I will probably take it back and have words, because it did not come to me cheap.

My second purchase was made on a second trip to said record store. I researched a little and decided I wanted it. "It" is a vinyl issue of Clem Snide's "Your Favorite Music". It's a good album and apparently was not released on vinyl before. The one I got is marbled light blue vinyl with a light green label - very pretty. Overall, I was happy with my purchases considering I didn't really plan to purchase anything on Black Friday.

So, I hope everybody had an enjoyable Thanksgiving and I hope no one got trampled trying to buy a new toaster today. Please try to be sane for the rest of the holiday season.

October Travels

I am not sure what really happened that caused me to be a month behind in sharing some exciting/fun/interesting to me things, but somehow, this is the position I am in. Some of the time I've been spending trying to sort out my home life and get my act together, and some has been spent trying to catch sleep between all the things going on. Anyway, here I am, and although a lot of what I have to say now is about stuff that happened like a month ago, I'm going to try to cover everything over the next few days.

Let's start with the end of October.

October 28, I headed to Nashville to see Rifftrax Live: House on Haunted Hill and meet some Twitter people - one in particular, a friend, Doug (@watchout4snakes), but we also briefly met Tracey (@euphoriafish) there too. I'm new to the meeting Twitter people thing and I'm mostly antisocial, but my AYCJ travels sort of made me a little better at it, so why not. As far as the movie goes, House on Haunted Hill is one of my favorites, and I really enjoyed the entire experience. I would say more about it, but my best recommendation would be to buy the DVD when it's released. Anyway, it was my first time in Tennessee, making it my 6th new state in under 2 months. The drive there was terribly long (about 9 hours), but I saw some amazing scenery along the way. I, sadly, missed the opportunity to stop at the American Museum of Science and Energy (yes, I'm nerdy) on my way back to Charleston, so I'm sure I'll return to Tennessee again in the future for a visit.

When I got back from Nashville, I had one day of rest. Then my friend, Angela, and her boyfriend, Greg, arrived from New Jersey. The next day (Halloween), we headed to Atlanta to see Jónsi (of Sigur Rós fame) at the Tabernacle. It was a long drive there and we were all pretty exhausted from too many accumulated car hours over the previous days. However, we managed to talk ourselves into getting all done up in costumes and going to the show. It was well worth it. It was an amazing show, but also kind of a weird experience for me. Sigur Rós and Jónsi are artists whose music I'm used to listening to by myself and in my own home. I don't recall ever listening to either in the car or ever intentionally with other people. For whatever reason, this music has some weird emotional effects on me. So, it was just strange being in a room full of other people experiencing the performance. But it was a really great one and I'm glad I had the chance to see it. (I have a video from the show, but I haven't uploaded it yet, so I'll have to share that later.) As far as costumes went, lots of people were dressed up - my favorite was a group of people dressed up as characters from Fantastic Mr. Fox - very clever and cute and well done (sadly, no photos of this).

Since these two trips, I've had some more travel and some fun experiences. Those stories, however, will have to wait for another day.

I hope everyone had a happy and safe Thanksgiving today.

I like Vetiver. The plant and the band. But here, the band.

When I'm in the car, I listen to a lot of music that I don't really listen to otherwise. For the most part, this is because I have a lot of CDs (500+) and don't have a stereo set up right now or the patience to import all of them to iTunes. So when I go on trips, it's a chance to revisit things I haven't heard in awhile for whatever reason. I keep adding CDs to my car until it's a total mess and then I have to reevaluate my choices.

One CD (which is digitally available to me, but I just haven't listened to recently) had been floating around my car for awhile without me ever listening to it. It's by this band called Vetiver. I saw Vetiver live opening for The Shins in what I think was 2007. I never actually saw The Shins on stage - it could've been a tape recorder playing back for all I knew - because I am so short and once the place filled up, I couldn't see anything. So Vetiver was all I got visually that evening. Everybody in the room seemed disinterested, including the boyfriend I went with to the show. But I had heard of the band, yet never heard their work, so I was kind of curious. My attentiveness paid off. The other people in the room that heard this band live seemed to be a bit less than thrilled. I liked them though. And it led to me checking out their albums, and I'm glad I did - they're not quite as fantastic live as recorded, but such is life.

Their first album (2004) is self-titled. And really good. For me, it's a very wintery album - dead trees and falling snow. That could just be because most of my memories of listening to it are from winter of 2007. Anyway, it's really good. Mostly acoustic and heavyish strings.

There was an EP released in 2005 which I have never heard, and then the second album. The second album is what I listened to on my trip through Pennsylvania a few days ago. It's rare that I'll listen to the same album over and over again, but it just had been a long time and I was surprised to find how much I like this one. It's called To Find Me Gone (2006) and it's a little more musically dense than the first album. While a lot of the acoustic sound is still there, it's just layered out a bit more with some electrics and some more production. This album is one of few that have not only an emotional effect on me but also a clear physical one. It's just very soothing to me - my breathing slows and becomes far more steady and controlled and I just am calm and such. I blame it on the repetition - the progressions are purely repetitive, but pretty much in a good way.

The first two albums were by far my favorite. I own the third one, Thing Of The Past (2008), which is an album of covers, but I've only listened to it once. To be fair, it could grow on me if I give it another chance, but it just didn't grab onto me from the first listen. They released another EP in 2008 of more covers, called More Of The Past, which I've also never heard. Their latest release is another album, which I just haven't gotten around to yet, called Tight Knit. I probably will check that out in the near future.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I really like this band and you should check them out. They supposedly belong to the "freak folk" genre, which I'd never heard of until I just looked up some info about their discography. I'm not good with genres, and I don't like them. I'm also not good with descriptions of what bands sound like, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that *to me*, Vetiver sound like Sam Beam (Iron&Wine) + Nick Drake + Devendra Banhart (who is featured on Vetiver's albums). But mostly, they sound like Vetiver to me. So check them out.

I have a hard time choosing "favorite" songs from the two albums I know, because I like them all. But I tried to, and there aren't any YouTube videos or anything for them anyway. So I'll leave you with links to a handful of those videos where it's just pictures or the album cover. That way, you at least get the recorded versions and get them clearly, and you can click them at your own discretion.

Oh Papa (from Vetiver)

Luna Sea (from Vetiver)

Double (from To Find Me Gone)

Rolling Sea (from Tight Knit)

I'll Stop Soon, Promise

I have to - this takes a toll on my body...

Last night, through some old channels, I was able to acquire tickets to see Mat Kearney & Ingrid Michaelson at the Music Farm here in Charleston. It wasn't a planned outing, but rather something that sort of came together at the last minute and worked out well.

Staci and I grabbed early dinner at Taste of India west of the Ashley. I haven't been there in a long time, but it was about as good as I remembered. Our usual Indian restaurant, Nirlep, isn't open on Mondays. Coincidentally, we usually want Indian food on Mondays.

Anyway, after that, we killed some time downtown at Kudu coffee. We kind of disrupted the illegal music sharing session of two people sitting in the same little nook we decided to occupy for a bit. The girl of this pair left and the guy was left to awkwardly listen in on our conversations. Every now and then, I caught him barely smiling out of the corner of my eye. Staci complimented his shoes - Vans slip-ons with dinosaurs on them, actually kind of fun - in an attempt to make conversation and take him out of the awkward listener stage, but he seemed very shy and was not into keeping up long-term conversation with us.

After an hour or so, we headed to the venue. We didn't get there ridiculously early, but somehow still ended up in the front row. Somebody is looking out for my short little self.

The concert was co-billed between Ingrid and Mat, and the opener was Cara Salimando. I've never heard of her before. She has a good voice but came off as being very young to me. Maybe she's not - but her material just seemed very young. It was a bit naive, but I didn't hate it.

Mat Kearney was up after that. He put on a good show, full of energy and interesting sidebars. Staci and I got chastised for making an inside joke while he had the audience clapping along - our joke disrupted the clapping and he stared us down and showed us how to do it right. I felt like I'd been slapped on the knuckles by a nun. He kept making very long eye contact with me and I thought it was kind of awkward, but figured it was just something he does. However, after his set, two girls approached me and started grilling me with questions. It went something like this: "Do you know Mat Kearney? - No. - Well I think you do now! - Why? - He kept staring at you. - Yes, I noticed. - We thought you were friends with him or his sister or something. - No..no. - Well, you are lucky!" I don't know why that makes me lucky. I guess it's the groupie thing - some girls want the attention of stars and want to be adored by them. I don't really care. Yes, it's kind of a fun little anecdote, but I'm not going to be like "OooHHhh he thinks I'm pretty!" or whatever. I figured I'd be bored on stage and find one person to fixate on too. At the end of the day, stars are people, and I still judge them on whether or not they're assholes - just like normal folks.

Ingrid Michaelson wrapped up the night. I knew most of her material going in, but I'm more of a casual listener, so it was interesting to hear her playing songs I wasn't SO overly familiar with. I like her attitude - she says things similar to things I say and seems to have the same sense of humor. That could be a stage thing, but it made me smile. I have a constant paranoia of people not getting me at all, so even if someone fake understands, that's cool. Her show involved lots of fun little bits. At the end of one song, all of the band members switched to a different instrument, and the bassist resumed singing the song. There was also some choreography and the encore boasted a cover of Death Cab for Cutie's "I Will Follow You Into The Dark", beginning with only Mat and Ingrid on stage, but then bringing in all the members from all the bands.

Anyway, it was an interesting show. I didn't intend upon going, but I knew that by the end of the week, I'd be bored and dying to get out of the apartment with nowhere to go. So I figured I should seize the opportunity while I had it.

Fleet Foxes! Holy shit!

Thursday night (July 30 for people who are "date challenged") I had the pleasure of driving to Philadelphia and actually making it to a concert on time.  I also had the experience of being directed by a parking attendant to back my father's car into a fence, but let's not talk about that.

Anyway, a friend and I headed to the Electric Factory to see Fleet Foxes.  I was looking forward to this for a very long time.  Being the nerd I am, I actually woke up early the morning the tickets went on sale to make sure I remember to get them RIGHT AWAY.  And when they arrived, I gave them a little special place on my refrigerator.  So when the day finally arrived I was sooooo happy.  I was twitching with happiness.  And possibly maybe dancing a little.

When we got there I was kind of confused and lost because I'd never been to this particular venue before and driving in Philadelphia tends to have this effect on me anyway.  So we took a little time to sit and talk and just relaxxx before things started.  We sat upstairs along the railing because I am short and we didn't get there early enough for me to stand right in front of the stage.  So being upstairs was kind of the best option available for me as far as being able to see.

The opening band was Espers.  They are from Philadelphia, so I hear.  And I kind of really didn't like them.  I probably would've liked them if it was sunny and we were in a field.  Or if I was smoking pot like all the kids downstairs.  Yes, you fuckers.  Thank you for ruining everything for everyone who isn't retarded by smoking ALL NIGHT and giving us all headaches and making us want to rain vomit down on you from above.  Seriously.  I know that people do this but there is a point at which the entire situation just becomes ridiculously.  That point was reached about 20 minutes into the evening.

ANYWAY.  Espers were not impressive.  Little bit weird for my taste.  That's saying something somehow.  So here's a picture of them:

Blurriest picture ever.  

And whoever was responsible for making sure everything sounded right for this band seriously sucked.  A lot.  But after maybe 30 minutes of that awful stuff, there was a quick reset for Fleet Foxes, during which they did their own sound check and went into the booth themselves to make sure things didn't suck.  And then they were on.  I had watched videos of their live performances before so I had kind of an idea that they were good but I was really extremely impressed.  It just is amazing that they are as tight as they are and that they immediately are in tune and in perfect harmony with each other - no searching for notes whatsoever, really I didn't hear a single mistake. 

All in all this concert probably falls into the #3 slot of my favorites of all time, right behind the Violent Femmes show at the Plex and Nicole Atkins at Snug Harbor.  Was very enjoyable and I'm sure I will be making an effort to see them again in the future.

Here, have some blurry pictures.  My camera seriously sucks so hard.  Maybe someday I'll do something about that.