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Nighthawk

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I'm seriously considering using my tax return to buy a banjo. I figure even if worse comes to worst it will help with my (minimal) guitar skills.

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Well, the cd player at work broke, so before I could go buy a new one, I had to listen to the radion. And I was stuck with the top 40 station, which wasn't bad, as it seemed to be 90s alternarock day yesterday morning with counting Crows, Blues Traveler and Gin Blossoms featured.

 

Anyway, I had to suffer through that Jesse McCartney single as well as Ryan cabrera, and I got me thinking that there hasn't been a goog pop love song written in years, with the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris" being the last good one. Every pop love song these days uses the same old similes and metaphors, and I think that the idea of a pop love song has become cliche nowadays. At least Rzeznick used great metaphor and actually was inspired rather than write a song just for radio play. Plus, "Iris" features one of my favourite lines of the last 10 or so years with When everything feels like the movies/You bleed just to know you're alive. Cheesy? Yes, but I still enjoy it.

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Guest Agent of Oblivion
I'm seriously considering using my tax return to buy a banjo. I figure even if worse comes to worst it will help with my (minimal) guitar skills.

Completely different animals. The only similarity is overall shape and vibrating strings. Well, unless you're a country picker on a really twangy acoustic, maybe. It's fun and challenging, though.

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Well, the cd player at work broke, so before I could go buy a new one, I had to listen to the radion. And I was stuck with the top 40 station, which wasn't bad, as it seemed to be 90s alternarock day yesterday morning with counting Crows, Blues Traveler and Gin Blossoms featured.

 

Anyway, I had to suffer through that Jesse McCartney single as well as Ryan cabrera, and I got me thinking that there hasn't been a goog pop love song written in years, with the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris" being the last good one. Every pop love song these days uses the same old similes and metaphors, and I think that the idea of a pop love song has become cliche nowadays. At least Rzeznick used great metaphor and actually was inspired rather than write a song just for radio play. Plus, "Iris" features one of my favourite lines of the last 10 or so years with When everything feels like the movies/You bleed just to know you're alive. Cheesy? Yes, but I still enjoy it.

While I do believe that there have been some decent-good pop love songs since then, I agree that few did it better than Rzeznik and the Goo Goo Dolls. I love "Iris", "Black Balloon", and really all of Dizzy Up The Girl.

 

Back between 1998-2001, I wrote a lot of acoustic, ballad-esque songs about love and heartbreak. Quite a efw turned out sounding like a GGD song, and I wasn't even going for that. The songs just flowed out of me. That shows how much Rzeznik's writing influenced me back then.

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Further comments on my foray into hillbilly music: I'm absolutely floored by some of the skill I'm seeing. I'm listening to these guys called Eric Weissberg (did "Dueling Banjos" for Deliverance) and Marshall Brickman and I'm saying "How in the hell can they play that fast?" There's not a note out of place. There's so much energy in their playing it feels like it's going to break, and they maintain absolute clarity. It's crazy. These guys aren't actual backwoods hillbillies, so it's not raw and genuine like the blues comparisons I made earlier, but their proficiency at their instruments is amazing.

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Surely you've heard some Earl Scruggs then?

Yeah. So far I've listened to Flatt and Scruggs, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Ralph Stanley by himself, and Dock Boggs (who is fucking evil).

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Guest Agent of Oblivion

I think they usually take a couple spins before I find the hook that drags me into the rest of the album. The Eye of Every Storm was really atypical of their style, I thought. If you're interested in a more raw sound from them, try Souls at Zero.

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I ignored it upon its release last year, but Sonic Youth's Sonic Nurse is really good. Kim Gordon manages to not be annoying!

that's amazing. i picked up 'murray street' recently, supposedly their best album in years, and kim gordon's most obvious contribution, "plastic sun," is atrocious, with lyrics like

 

Get your hands on my tomato

Cherry juice on a rotten potato

Subway slasher is on my ass

Steals my money and smokes my grass

 

i don't even know what that's supposed to mean.

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If everything the Doves had done was as good as "There Goes The Fear," they'd be nearly as good as Pulp in terms of fairly straight-ahead rock. As it stands, I think they're just pretty good.

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I ignored it upon its release last year, but Sonic Youth's Sonic Nurse is really good. Kim Gordon manages to not be annoying!

that's amazing. i picked up 'murray street' recently, supposedly their best album in years, and kim gordon's most obvious contribution, "plastic sun," is atrocious, with lyrics like

 

Get your hands on my tomato

Cherry juice on a rotten potato

Subway slasher is on my ass

Steals my money and smokes my grass

 

i don't even know what that's supposed to mean.

Kim Gordon is usually the worst thing about any Sonic Youth album, including their best one, Daydream Nation. However, her contributions to Sonic Nurse are easy to take because her vocals are buried just low enough in the mix to where you can hear her, but not make out what she's saying.

 

The worst lyric of hers, by the way, comes from NYC Ghosts & Flowers:

 

boys go to Jupiter

get more stupider!

girls go to Mars

become rock stars!

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If everything the Doves had done was as good as "There Goes The Fear," they'd be nearly as good as Pulp in terms of fairly straight-ahead rock. As it stands, I think they're just pretty good.

Aha, but Pulp were so much more, the best, wittiest expression of the UK 90s underclass, to be precise. And they were from SHEFFIELD!

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I somehow got that "I Need A Hero" song on my computer and have no idea how. It's something of a pleasant surprise though, especially the last thirty seconds.

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Joanna Newsom is awful enough to make me think that rape might be OK.

I enjoy her quite a bit.

 

Though I'm getting properly sick about this whole "freak-folk" scene. Sure, Devendra is nice to listen to, but he's not doing anything new.

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