Music Reeve U's

* Listened to In Rainbows....it's good, very good. I think it may be Radiohead's third-best record. They actually (get this) released some songs that sound like songs with a melody and everything! Revolutionary! I don't want to sound like one of these asses who's all "Aw man, Radiohead got weird, man, why can't everything be as good as Just?" I didn't like Amnesiac, and I thought Hail To The Thief was a poor effort. It was just a case of Radiohead making music that didn't particularly appeal to me. No big deal. I still thought they were a good band, if edging into the Beck/Ryan Adams/Prince territory where idea of the musician as an ideal was better than the actual music produced by said musician. Happily for me, In Rainbows was a more fun listen and hopefully a sign that Radiohead can regain their spot as one of my favourite bands. Just about every track stood out on first listen, with Reckoner getting special mention as my favourite song of the moment.


* Hey, did you know that Radiohead got its name from a Talking Heads song? Yes, that's right, it's once again time for Mark to indulge in his latest bit of obsession with the Talking Heads. I've been finding more and more TH stuff on YouTube, and my searches led me to this cover of Burning Down The House by Tom Jones and the Cardigans. Now, just hearing 'Tom Jones and the Cardigans cover Burning Down The House' is awesome, and the first half of the track kicks as much ass as you'd expect. But am I crazy, or does it just seem to run out of steam with about a minute to go? A song made of pure kinetic energy like BDTH should never go flat, but it seems like nothing after the main lyrical portion of the track is done with. Check out the video yourself and see what you think. Whatever happened to the Cardigans, anyway? They seemed like the kind of band that should've made a bigger impact than they did. If nothing else, they should've gotten some mileage out of the fact that Nina Persson was one of the few universally-agreed upon hot women in music.




* By the way, did I never review Icky Thump? A quick search of my blog archive tells me I didn't. Well, to limit it to a sentence, it's my favourite album in years. My list of favourite albums from the 2000's has a new #1 -- yes, it's that good. Big memorable riffs, catchy melodies and probably most of all, great lyrics. I'm one of those who concentrates more on music than lyrics in a song, in some cases not really even taking note of the words until I read them in the liner notes. On Icky Thump, however, the lyrics stood out as being particularly memorable and witty. Jack White isn't reinventing the wheel with epic song topics or anything; he's just very skilled at pouring old wine into new bottles, which is essentially the theme of the White Stripes' rock-blues-country music anyway. My silly reason for enjoying the disc is that it has some of my favourite song titles in recent memory. When a song is called "I'm Slowly Turning Into You," it pretty much has to be good, eh? Also, I have Effect & Cause written down somewhere on my list of potential short story titles, so I'm biased in that regard. Wait, did I say biased? I meant litigious. See you in court, White.