September 27, 2005


So back in the day, when this space enjoyed the privilege of having two roommates with full college radio credentials and two others with more excellent musical tastes than we could reasonably keep up with, it wasn't hard to come up with one or two new bands a month that were worth listening to. Now we're old and all adult-like, and drifting through a big musical desert—too many ads to listen to the radio, so I don't, and not enough time in front of the iMac, so not enough streaming indie radio. What happens instead is that every 18 months or so I stumble randomly across a new band, usually by watching Conan (Built to Spill), very occasionally listening to college radio (Cato Salso Experience), or reading local arts weeklies (Scissorfight). The source of the latest of these bands (The Decemberists) caught us by surprise, however: NPR. This is amazing for two reasons:

  1. NPR's music review segment usually covers music that I have absolutely no interest in.
  2. The reviews themselves, like the reviewers' voices, all overamplified and artificially bassy, are annoying to the point that their start usually signals the end of NPR for that commute.

But here I am, having dug around the NPR website for a two-week-old podcast of a live song they played part of, and the song is now stuck deeply in my head. So deeply that I must, as always, listen to the song repeatedly until I'm well and truly sick of it, and I've memorized it so I'm at least no longer plagued by not knowing what all the notes are. It's annoying that this is necessary. This will take three or four days.

So now I'm going around humming the same eight bars repeatedly. Even worse for the lovely wife, I'm now just competent enough with the guitar that I can approximate the chords as I sing along. The cute kid is nice enough to tolerate the doodling while she plays with her toys, but I figure I've got about three years before she starts insisting that I neither play nor sing anywhere within several miles of her. The iPod and my Happy Family brand bourbon will pull me through.

Anyway, The Decemberists is this space's new recent band. Based on one song. We'll see how that turns out.
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The President has asked Americans to drive less so they use less gas. This is, apparently, real. No word yet on whether he's noticed that buying oversized SUV's was a bad idea all along.
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