Unfinished Projects

I was planning to get all my CSS finished up here before starting to post, but that is taking a long time (surprise!) and I might feel like a bum if there are no posts for the entire month of March. So yeah, let me preach a little bit about the new debut album by Marnie Stern, called ‘In Advance of the Broken Arm’. Basically, I am really loving it. Zach Hill plays drums on the album. Usually that would be enough to get me into something, but here is just a bonus. Marnie plays very ripping guitar, with a fair bit of resemblence to Spencer Seim. So yeah, you could say that this sounds pretty much like a Hella album pretty well. What I would say, though, is that this album is what I wish Hella would sound like with vocals (unlike ‘There’s No 666 In Outer Space’, which actually is Hella with vocals and is pretty disappointing). She adds in vocals without trying to make room by diluting the instrumental density, if that makes any sense. Besides all the Hella comparisons, I think that another pretty good point of reference for the songwriting is Mary Timony. I might just be saying that because I’ve been listening to her ‘Mountains’ album almost as much as Marnie Stern.

Ok, I’ve got a link around here somewhere to an mp3 for the song ‘Every Single Line Means Something’. This isn’t my favorite song on the album, though. That honor goes to ‘The Diamond Ceiling’, which has this really awesome Peter-and-the-Wolf-style leitmotif thing going on.

My record in going out to shows has been pretty regrettable lately, but there are plans to turn that around this weekend. Battles is (are?) playing tonight at the empty bottle. I hear that they have added vocals to their new songs, so maybe they have a chance of being what I wish Hella with vocals would sound like as well. And Lightning Bolt is playing in a coffee shop here at the university on saturday. I’m going to try to take some pictures at that one because it’ll (hopefully) be pretty wild. My one concert triumph in the last couple of months, though, was going to see Secret Chiefs 3. You can tell that they are really cool because the website lists ‘primary weapons’ and ‘secondary weapons’ for each band member. Jenn suggested that I should have invited Daniel Z and she was right. So Dan, if you read this and are bummed out, sorry.