Hey, so I haven’t really updated this thing in an extremely long time. I’ve been in Lucknow, India, studying Urdu, and haven’t really had time to update. So I’m sorry about that. On the plus side, I’ve heard a bunch of great tunes in the last year or so since I posted, so I’ll try to get through some of them. I’m starting grad school at Berkeley (where I also did my undergrad) in a couple months, but I hope I’ll have the willpower required to force myself to play on the computer every so often.

Let’s see if I can play against type and not just post some Indian thing. My friend Alex, who follows all the phenomenal music that comes out of Scandinavia much more closely than I do, gave me this album called 8BP050, which is a chiptune compilation, basically dance music made with Gameboys and other low-fi beepy things. One of my favorite songs on the album is “Switchblade Squadron,” by Covox, who appears to be a Swede named Thomas Söderlund. I never had a Gameboy, or even any other kind of video game platform, making me probably the only American born in the ’80s who doesn’t know all the names of the different characters and bad guys in Mario Bros. Nor do I think of myself as someone who really likes electronic stuff all that much. Regardless, this is a hell of a catchy, upbeat, beepy little song, and a bunch of the other numbers on the album are pretty good, too. The whole thing is a great driving soundtrack, especially now it’s summer, and you can tool around with the windows down, thinking about how cool you are for listening to music that little 8×8 characters would dance to if they were at a little on-screen nightclub in 1989.

Covox - Switchblade Squadron

Whoops, it seems I forgot to post this one when I wrote it almost 2 weeks ago. Sorry for the delay!

One of my favorite new bands of 2004 was the Ditty Bops, who are an adorable duo from my hometown, Los Angeles. My friend Rachel and I went to go see them at Slim’s, in San Francisco, last Saturday, in the midst of a weekend of art pileup - previously that day, I’d seen the superb 1983 PBS graffiti documentary Style Wars, then Nick Cave’s disappointing new Australian Western The Proposition for $3 at Oakland’s fabulous Parkway theater. After the Ditty Bops show, I met friends at the Cat Club for Club Gossip, the monthly 80s video dancefest. Aside from fishing around in a trash can for pieces of my broken glasses, the highlight was probably going to the 24-hour King Diner for chili cheese fries before running to barely make it onto the 3:20 BART train (open late for construction). The next day was calmer; the only major media stimulation was the Al Gore movie, which was fairly good despite the heavy layers of self-promotion. For a superb, and much shorter, movie about Al Gore, check out the sometimes frustrating and often excellent Wholphin DVD that came with the 18th issue of the usually frustrating and rarely excellent McSweeney’s.

OK, maybe I just wanted to talk about all the movies I saw last weekend. That’s not counting the tremendously boring, emotionally unengaging, but very beautifully shot The Weeping Meadow, which I saw on the premise that a three-hour Greek movie about decades in the life of a family would be as good as The Best of Youth, the amazingly great six-hour Italian epic about forty years of an Italian family. It’s also not counting the other movie I saw earlier in the week, Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (Don’t Cry About Salim the Cripple), which is a moving 1989 Hindi film (although not really Bollywood, since it was short, realistic and had no songs) about how it sucks to be Muslim, sucks to be a gangster, and really sucks to be a small-time Muslim gangster in Bombay.

You can tell that I like movies. I also really like old jazz, and I think it’s a shame that it largely only remains on record and in the performances of earnest bands who play at county fairs and folk-music clubs. The Ditty Bops are a lovely exception. They have the veneer of an indie rock band, and their fans are the same people you’d see in the crowd of one of the friendlier indie bands, like the Decemberists. But when you look at it, they actually turn out to be more of a ragtime and early jazz band. One of their best songs is even a cover of the Fats Waller song “Sister Kate,” and they played a catchy Boswell Sisters cover, too. Their own songs are much in the same idiom, although of course they aren’t just mindless imitators, mooching the glories of past virtuosi. “Wishful Thinking” is my favorite of their endearing original songs, and comes from their self-titled first album, which I prefer to the new one. Just to spice it up a little, this is a bootleg from a 2004 show in LA, a few days before I saw them at Cafe Du Nord in San Francisco. If you’re in the US and east of California, you’ve got pretty good odds of being able to catch their delightful live show; since they’re biking across the country, it’s going to take them a while to work their way over to New York.

The Ditty Bops - Wishful Thinking

I just moved over all the old posts from this blog’s former incarnation. The format has changed a little bit, but it’s still the same idea: good music, and who cares where it’s from?

I originally picked up Ramsay Midwood’s Shoot Out at the OK Chinese Restaurant just because I thought the title was funny. He looks like a young dude, but his voice has a lovely old-man muddledness. I’m pretty sure his whole act is a put-on, like Creedence, but it’s not really important. “Esther” is a beautiful, slow ballad; almost a lullaby.

Ramsay Midwood - Esther

Kaizers Orchestra - Bak et Halleluja

I heard about this band from Tom Waits, who wrote one of those my favorite 20 albums things in the Observer (UK). Some of those are great, but it’s also worth looking at the other 9 that he put in the online addendum. All he says about this album, Ompa til du dør (Ompa Till You Die) is, “Norwegian storm trooping tarantellas with savage rhythms and innovative textures. Thinking man�s circus music. Way out.” And that might be the most that’s really sayable. Once you’ve listened to the music, it becomes obvious why Tom Waits likes them - they’ve obviously listened to Rain Dogs more than once; the album even begins more or less the same way as “Jockey Full of Bourbon.” But they’re much dancier and excitable than him. “Bak et Halleluja,” especially, is frenzied and relentless. I had to go somewhere immediately after the first time I heard it, and I was jittery and talkative like I’d done more than just listen to a really fast song.

Kaizers Orchestra sell lots and lots of records and win tons of awards in Scandinavia, but they have crap distribution outside Europe. In North America, you can get it for pretty cheap (US$20) from the Canadian company MusicSelection. I got mine from them, and it came quickly, with no hassles.

King Louie and the Swinging Monkeys - Loneliness

My friend Hallie is from Houston, and these are some kids she went to high school with. Most of their songs are good-natured love letters to drugs and that sort of thing, and fine, as far as they go. But this one’s the best, with a fantastic, murky sound and sleepy vocals, plus a groove that does the dancing for you, although it obviously wants you to help. Their web page and the guy in the picture’s Marley shirt say that they’re a reggae band, but they’re really not at all. The page is pretty 1997-core, and it doesn’t look like it’s been updated too much recently, but there’s some MP3s you can download. I don’t really know that much about King Louie, but I think maybe some of the members go to USC now. I want them to make a real CD, but I’m not standing on one foot or anything waiting for it.

Kay Kay, Dominique and Chorus - Tadap Tadap

I saw Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (We Gave Our Hearts Secretly, Darling), the movie that this song comes from, about four months ago, and since then, I’ve had to listen to this song every few days, sometimes a few times a day. On its face, it’s glossy, ornate, and filled maybe past capacity with instruments and background singers. But these frills don’t weigh the song down at all. The main singer, Kay Kay (sometimes written K.K.), raises his voice however he wants above the percussionists, and they stay out of his way. For a lot of the time, he’s almost alone. The pace stays pretty fast, and it almost sounds like any snappy Bollywood pop song, but when Kay Kay gets up high, he turns mournful.

The sadness of the song is easier to hear when you know what the words mean, so it’s lucky that someone at BollyWhat translated it for us. In the movie, even more, the sadness builds up as the song is worked into the misplaced-love story and repeated, and it winds up being really moving, if you’re liable to get taken up in sad stories. The movie’s worth talking about for a minute. It’s directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, and, like his amazing movie Devdas, the music is by Ismail Darbar. It’s about Aishwarya Rai, the daughter of half-Italian Salman Khan’s demanding music teacher, who falls in love with him even though he’s sort of an oaf. She ends up having to marry Ajay Devgan, and is very unhappy about that. Then the second half starts, and a whole lot more stuff happens. Among other excitements, there’s a kite festival, a trip to Italy, played by Hungary, and a charming grandma, Zohra Sehgal, who’s the cute granny in every single Bollywood movie ever, even the ones made in the ’40s. Also Bend It Like Beckham. Salman Khan is way less annoying than usual, and gets pretty infectiously teary-eyed in parts, and Aishwarya is good, as she only is in Bhansali’s movies; like normal, Ajay Devgan is excellent. And the whole soundtrack is nice. Darbar’s music is all elaborate like this, and often as good, but he’s sort of stuck up.
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