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NEW LINKS COMIN' SOON

Best Week Ever
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You Ain't No Picasso
Music (For Robots)
videos.antville.org

so the new Metric album comes out next week. fun fun fun.

i like Metric. i don't love them the way i love alot of bands, but i quite enjoy Metric. they're only a point of focus in my mind this week because i bought a ticket to see them in Tampa in November. if you're in the area, i suggest you come. they're a fun band and tickets are only ten bucks. November 16th, for those of you palying at home. if you're not in florida, see if they're playing near you. if the tickets are cheap here, they might be everywhere else too.

anyway, i thought i'd share a couple of their music videos, since moving images are more effective means of exciting people into paying attention, ok? specifically, i'm going to be pointing out the recurring theme of soldiers as toys.


Succexy was just about everybody's favorite track from 2003's Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?. The video very simply but graphically portrays a platoon of G.I. Joes being taken out by a sniper on a table top, then, two armies of little plastic army men annihilate each other out across the kitchen floor.


Combat Baby takes that concept a step farther, involving some limited puppetry, animation, and live action footage into the moving diorama of action figures and plastic toy tanks involved in choreographed dancing.


Monster Hospital is the first single from the new album, Live It Out, and I think its an appropriate choice, since I feel that alot of the music on this album conveys a "monster movie" feeling. This video is almost exclusively live action, with some film sequence montage stuff thrown in during the bridge, where we also see the return of the little army man, seen above.

War is clearly a prevalent theme in Metric's songs, noticeably in these three which have all been successful singles. I particularly enjoy the chorus of "Monster Hospital," where Emily sings "I fought the war. I fought the war but the war wouldn't stop for the love of god. I fought the war. I fought the war but the war won."

Emily is also one of the two female vocalists for canadian indie supergroup Broken Social Scene (the other female vocalist is solo crooner and King of Convenience collaborator Leslie Feist), where she sang the song that broke my heart and made me love BSS, "Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl"

today is the four-year anniversary of september eleventh, and i'm sure nobody wants to hear a recap of all that because we've all heard enough to make us sick. i think just about every new yorker i know has already removed any worthwhile ideas from the date september eleventh and are generally uninterested in it anymore (in a cooly typical new york fashion. its part of the reason i love it there.
so, instead, here are two songs that seem particularly of interest to me today.


First up is They Might Be Giants' "I'll Sink Manhattan MP3," from their 1991 b-sides collection Miscellaneous T
obviously, the sentiment in the song's title has a bit of a different message today, not that it was ever a particularly upbeat message to begin with.
the song is actually about a love that blossoms and then fizzles. john flansburgh once said it was, specifically, about "falling in love with someone, falling out of love with them, and then hunting them down and killing them." in the song, he seems to use the entire island of manhattan as a metaphor for their love and feels he must destroy it. the very concept of "sinking" it seems to be a metaphor of sorts, as he admits in the song "i've got a message, so before i get through i'll find your answering machine and i'll sink it first"
i've played this song on every september eleventh for the past three years. i'm a pretty lousy person, i guess.


Next is a brand new track from TV On The Radio, "Dry Drunk Emperor MP3," recorded as a response to President Bush and the whole situation with Hurricane Katrina.
this song is basically a 6:46 epic call to arms against the current administration, but unlike many similar songs right now, it doesn't force the band's opinion down your throat, which i appreciate, though i do have plenty of throat-jamming anti-bush songs in my iTunes library. i personally love towards the end when the swelling chorus of voices chants "what if all the bleeding hearts took it on themselves to make a brand new start. organs pumpin on their sleeves, paint murals on the white house, feed the leaders L.S.D" it is also worth noting that the boys of TVOTR are headlining a benefit concert in Brooklyn tonight where all of the proceeds, even from the bar, go directly to the Red Cross to support the aid of New Orleans.

so what do these two bands have in common? plenty! for one, they are both from Brooklyn. for another, they both have four-word band names that are usually abbreviated, and those abbreviations both begin with the letter T. also, both bands started out as just two art students goofing around with limited instruments and a whole lot of weird loop and sample effects, and both bands have since evolved into larger bands with an impressive live show. the difference there is that most TMBG fans miss the good old days of just john and john being quirky on stage and all reports i've read of the earliest TVOTR shows are that they were completely unprepared and had no idea what they were doing. they're also both awesome, though i've had a handful of dislike with recent TMBG material.

in case you haven't been loving it already over the summer like i have, i strongly reccomend you all download the PAS/CAL - La Laque split 12" mp3s, which are free from the Romantic Air Records website for a limited time, as it is physically only available in vinyl.


Side A: PAS/CAL - Summer Is Almost Here MP3
Side B: La Laque - Secret MP3

i can't go because i'm in stupid florida, but Ben Folds is doing a free concert at the apple store in SoHo (two blocks from MoCCA. i used to go play with the iPods and such before opening the gallery during the summer)
if anyone reads this and can go, they start giving out wristbands for entry around 3pm today and start admitting people with wristbands into the second floor theater area around 6:30pm for a 7pm show. only about 125 people will get entry.

wowowow.

by now, coverage of the crisis in New Orleans is completely unavoidable, so i'm sure everybody is aware of how horrible the conditions are and i'm sure everyone who watches the news or reads newspaper editorials is equally outraged by the federal government's utter lack of handling the situation at all. i'm getting most of my news via blogs, as i don't watch television at school, but i'm just shocked by it all, and i feel a little bit guilty since the storm passed us by when it was a category one and opted instead to power-up over the gulf and attack New Orleans.

some light humor to the outrage of it all:


Kanye West lost his composure during a telethon-styled call for help on NBC, and both Mike Myers and Chris Tucker seemed completely taken aback by what he was saying, as did the producers who eventually turned his mic down.
watch the whole segment or just Kanye's outburst (both are streaming WMV)

sadly, each time i watch it, i stifle a good-hearted laugh when he says "George Bush does not care about black people."


The Big Ticket has a fantastic roundup of the editorials regarding the federal governement's massive fucking-up this week. here's my favorite, a quote from CNN's The Situation Room:
"The questions we ask on The Situation Room every afternoon, Wolf, are posted on the website 2 to 3 hours before we go on the air, and people who read the website often begin to respond to the questions before the show actually starts. The question this hour is: How would you rate the response of the federal government to Hurricane Katrina?

I’ve got to tell you something, we got 500-600 letters before the show even went on the air. No one -- no one -- says the federal government is doing a good job in handling one of the most atrocious and embarrassing and far-reaching and calamitous things that has come along in this country in my lifetime. I’m 62, I remember the riots in Watts, I remember the earthquake in San Francisco. I remember a lot of things. I have never, ever, seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans."

astounding.

this hurricane is the universe's way of proving to the disbelievers that the Bush White House are bad, bad people and they are most certainly not good for america.
i'm not a heartless political spinner, though. i do realize that this is absolutely horrible and i hope that every resource we've got is used to help all those people. things are deplorable. they're people, families, and they are scared and dying.