Sunday, July 31, 2005
in my stereo:

Medications - All Your Favorite People In One Place
Ying Yang Twins - U.S.A. (United State of Atlanta)
Nature's Problem - Welcome To Baltimore City
DJ Chris J. - Club Mix Volume #16
Mullyman - The Leak Mixtape
Cassidy - I'm A Hustla
Fat Joe - All Or Nothing
DJ Kay Slay - The Streetsweeper Vol. 2: Pain From The Game
Fugazi - Repeater + 3 Songs
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Live At Berkeley

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Friday, July 29, 2005
If meanspirited metablogs like indierock4eva (and my aborted copycat dipset4eva project) are the next blog trend, then look out for this one, which consists of nothing but quotes from a bleeding heart liberal's livejournal, and is way more entertaining than it has a right to be (and is from the twisted mind that brought you F.M.C.). I take no responsibility for the offensiveness of either of these blogs or their names. There's also the 1997 Blog, which consists of 3 cryptic jokes that nobody, including me, can figure without it being explained to them.

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Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Meet the new boss. Congrats to Jess Harvell, the new music editor for the Baltimore City Paper. I'd been kind of anxiously waiting to see who would get the job ever since it opened up a couple months ago. Tom Breihan was offered the job right after he decided to move to New York, so he turned it down, but put in a word for me even though I hadn't dreamed of applying for it. But they asked me to apply, so I sent in my resume and went in for an interview and all that, more as a chance to meet the people I'd only e-mailed with up until that point than with any real hope of getting the job. I just got out of college, and I've only been writing for money since April when Bret, the previous music editor, asked me to write for CP because of Gov't Names. So I'm not mad at all that I didn't get the job, I know I'm underqualified right now. Mainly I was just concerned with who did get the job, because if the music editor wasn't Bret or Tom, odds are it wouldn't be someone who knew me or my writing as well that I'd be pitching to. So I'm glad that Jess got the job. We've been bitchy to each other ILM from time to time but there's definitely mutual respect there and I wish him the best with the job. And as an out-of-towner, he'll need all the help he can get from local writers for all the Baltimore music coverage that the music section entails, so he's welcome to whatever knowledge I can share. And yeah, before you know it, the CP music section is probably going to be more full of blog/ILM people than, well, the Seattle Weekly.

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Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Jeff, who has made corporate America his bitch, is doing the official podcast for TowerRecords.com. Check it out.

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Movie Diary

Monday, July 25, 2005
The Island
This was J.G.'s choice, and when the credits rolled, she turned to me and apologized. I didn't think it was that bad, though! I didn't go in expecting much but they got a lot of mileage out of a not great premise. A lot of bad, unintentionally funny dialogue, but also some genuinely funny moments, like when they learned how to say "dude". It kinda reminded me a lot of old school dystopian sci fi flicks like Soylent Green more than anything recent. And it was clever how they managed to work Scarlett Johansson's real life Calvin Klein ad into the movie.

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Friday, July 22, 2005
top ten:

1. Dinosaur Jr. - "The Lung"
2. Three 6 Mafia f/ 8Ball & MJG and Young Buck - "Stay Fly"
3. Little Feat - "Long Distance Love"
4. Grand Buffet - "Pink Deadly"
5. Luther Vandross - "Never Too Much"
6. Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz f/ Bohagon - "Get Crunk"
7. Blaq Starr - "Get My Gun"
8. Natasha Bedingfield - "These Words"
9. Montgomery Gentry - "My Town"
10. The Cars - "Bye Bye Love"

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Thursday, July 21, 2005
The Oranges Band review on Stylus today, which I gave a B- but it ended up with a C for some reason. Also, the Baltimore City Paper's annual Big Music Issue came out this week, and I didn't write anything for it, but there is some good stuff in there, including Breihan's great Rjyan Kidwell piece. This year the CP site did an mp3 mix to go along with the issue, including songs by some people I've written about on here and on Gov't Names before (Lake Trout, Oranges, Ogun, Ammo).

Note: In light of the end of Stylus in 2007, I decided to archive the text of all my reviews for the site on this blog for posterity, since I don't what the future holds for the Stylus domain, and have included both the letter grade ratting that accompanied the original review, and an adjusted rating that I would give the record now in retrospect.

The Oranges Band
The World & Everything In It
Lookout!
2005
Stylus rating: C
Adjusted rating by reviewer: B-

he Oranges Band are from Maryland, and judging from their music, you might think they spend more time downstate in Ocean City than in Baltimore, where they formed. In sound and in spirit, their music casually evokes beaches and boardwalks far more than the dirty harbor of their hometown. They’re not above laying it on a little thick in case you miss it, though: sand and surf adorn the cover of their 2nd full length, The World & Everything In It, released in the middle of summer, and two songs have the words “ride” and “wave” in the title. Even the lyrics of a song called “The Mountain” reference the ocean and the shore.

Like frequent tourmates The Hold Steady (Craig Finn wrote their latest press bio) and Lookout! labelmates Ted Leo/Pharmacists, The Oranges Band trade in the kind of meat-and-potatoes riff rock that sounds vaguely pre-indie, but isn’t particularly retro. The tense staccato strums of their guitars and the rigid shuffle of their drums almost seem to represent some kind of neutral, platonic ideal of guitar music without actually being that ideal or exciting. It’s a sound that’s comfortably conventional, but not splashy enough or as focused on hooks and harmonies to be categorized as power pop.

But the bland sonic makeup of The Oranges Band (originally formed as just The Oranges) is redeemed by the insistently chugging rhythms that helped their simple songs go down easy in smoky nightclubs and on their first album, 2003’s All Around, and the three EPs that preceded it. So the slight variations on their formula on The World & Everything In It aren’t necessarily a welcome change. While they don’t try to pull off any ballads, the handful of slower songs drag more than they have a right to, and fail to hint at any depth or versatility that’s missing from the straight-ahead rockers. If, like Superchunk, the up-tempo uniformity of The Oranges Band’s early material is a strength, then they can be accused of arriving a little too quickly at the more gentle phase that Superchunk took at least six or seven albums to get around to.

Singer/guitarist Roman Kuebler, who previously fronted Roads To Space Travel and briefly played bass in Spoon, wrote and produced every song on The World & Everything In It. But The Oranges Band don’t particularly sound like the work of one dominant personality, and are at their best when they sound like a faceless surf rock band that happens to have let some aloof vocals float over their driving riffs.

In fact, a floating, distant feeling hangs all over the album. Up until the searing lead guitar line of “Atmosphere,” tucked away in the penultimate position, the whole album can easily wash over the listener without demanding their attention. The album does, however, sound pretty good when it’s too hot to move or think, which tends to happen a lot around this time of year. So there might be something to that summer theme The Oranges Band are pushing after all. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have a plan for keeping anyone listening in a few months when the weather gets cold again.

Reviewed by: Al Shipley
Reviewed on: 2005-07-21

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Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Two otherwise normal-seeming people I have worked with in the past year have had Shinedown's "45" (specifically the "staring down the barrel of a 45" part) as their ringtone. One of them also had the Disturbed guy going "OOOH WAH-AH-AH-AH" ringtone. What the fuck, people.

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Movie Diary

Monday, July 18, 2005
1) War Of The Worlds
Really this was just worst case scenario porn, wasn't it? The kind of thing that I'd be bored by if I waited to see it on DVD, but in the theater with the big sound system and everything the really cool scary scenes actually make my jaw drop. Still kind of unsatisfactory, though, just because it didn't feel like there was any connection between the 28 different ways the aliens would kill people other than that they all looked weird and scary, and their downfall, which of course was part of the original H.G. Wells story, but still felt rushed and unsatisfactory.

2) Sabretooth
J.G. likes to watch these terrible low budget made for TV flicks on the Sci Fi Channel, and I have to say, this one was pretty entertaining. The computer animated sabretooth tigers would've been kind of impressive in a video game but in any kind of live action movie it just looks fake as hell. And it decapitates a bunch of people and there's a lot of needlessly complicated plot lines and character interactions, and Gimli from LOTR/Professor Maximilian Arturo from Sliders was there too! The plot about reanimating an extinct species that kills a bunch of people was ripped off pretty hardcore from Jurassic Park, but not nearly as much as the movie that came on after it, Raptor Island, which we didn't stay up to watch all of because it was getting late. But Lorenzo Lamas was in that one! And Raptor Island 2: Raptor Planet is coming soon!

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Saturday, July 16, 2005
Great Fluxblog selection the other day of one of my favorite Geraldine Fibbers tracks. Also, The Sands, who I mentioned a minute ago, have an mp3 up on Riff Raff, which says SFJ sings on it but I don't know what his voice sounds like and it sounds a lot like Chris Lee on some parts of it, maybe only harmonizing. I still don't get the whole Riff Raff/Riff Central thing, though. Are the interviews fake or just staged in a way that's supposed to be awkward and funny? Either way it reads like all those indie rock in-joke articles on The Onion.

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Friday, July 15, 2005
I usually find Disney's straight-to-video sequels distasteful, at least to whatever extent I can feign offense at anything Disney does for a quick buck, but The Emperor's New Groove was easily their best non-Pixar feature out of the last dozen or so, and I have to admit I'm kinda looking forward to the December DVD release of Kronk's New Groove, which centers around Patrick Warburton's character, who was the best thing about the original.

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Thursday, July 14, 2005
in my stereo:

The Posies - Every Kind Of Light
Missy Elliott - The Cookbook
R. Kelly - TP3: Reloaded
Foo Fighters - In Your Honor
My Chemical Romance - Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge
Skarr Akbar - Streetsweepers presents Show Me Your Soul: The General Pt. 2 hosted by DJ Radio
Sloan - A Sides Win: Singles 1992-2005
Scott Amendola Band - Believe
Various Artists - XXX: State of the Union - Music From the Motion Picture
mixes from plum drank

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Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Fat Joe review in Stylus today.

Note: In light of the end of Stylus in 2007, I decided to archive the text of all my reviews for the site on this blog for posterity, since I don't what the future holds for the Stylus domain, and have included both the letter grade ratting that accompanied the original review, and an adjusted rating that I would give the record now in retrospect.

Fat Joe
All Or Nothing
Atlantic
2005
Stylus rating: B-
Adjusted rating by reviewer: B-

More than a decade deep in the game now, Fat Joe can now stand tall as a rap veteran and a king of New York. But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s spent most of his career as an also-ran. As a member of the respected crews D.I.T.C. and Terror Squad, he watched more talented peers like Big L and Big Punisher move ahead of him, with the younger Big Pun becoming the first Latino solo rapper to go platinum. And after Pun passed away, Joey took on the Puffy role of keeping his memory alive while not exactly filling the void he left. When Joe did score hits of his own, it was with the help of R&B singers like R. Kelly and Ashanti.

All that changed last summer when “Lean Back” became not only Joe Crack’s first hit carried almost solely on his own shoulders, but a gargantuan #1 summer smash. That it was credited to Terror Squad and that group member Remy Ma contributed a verse were moot points as far as how song elevated Joe’s status. But unfortunately, a cardinal rule of major label hip hop is that group albums never sell as well as solo albums, and no matter how big “Lean Back” was, the Terror Squad album to which it was attached failed to even go gold.

Joe was still primed to capitalize on his new level of fame, though, following up with a solo album, Things Of That Nature, that fall. Six months of delays and a title change later, All Or Nothing arrived in stores this summer with a somewhat deflated momentum. The title was apparently switched so late in the recording process that Joe shouts out the wrong title 3 times on “Intro” alone, as well on one of the singles, “Get It Poppin’.” Joe has stated that the raised stakes of his post-“Lean Back” fame and beef with 50 Cent inspired the change to All Or Nothing. But in a recent XXL cover story, Joe was surprisingly blunt about the odds stacked against him: “Right now, I look like I’m gonna sell 300...400,000 for All Or Nothing.” If it’s All Or Nothing, it would seem Joe’s ready to settle for nothing, or at least not much.

Joe shouldn’t despair, though. Even if he sells a fraction of the copies that 50 has, he can take pride in having made a slightly hotter album than The Massacre, as dubious as an accomplishment that may be. All Or Nothing is essentially the same album Joey’s been making for a few years, including the kinds of slightly embarrassing crossover attempts you’d hope he’d have enough confidence to abandon after “Lean Back” blew up bigger than “What’s Luv.” But there’s also a generous share of stubbornly classicist 90’s NYC shit, from the fantastic opening salvo of “Intro” and “Does Anybody Know” to the two-part narrative “Temptation,” though “Trapped In The Closet” it is not.

And the cameos from Nelly and R. Kelly don’t quite do their job anyway, because the catchiest hook is on the album is actually on the diss record. “My Fo Fo,” Joe’s response to 50 Cent’s “Piggy Bank,” interpolates the Flintstones theme song for a hilarious singsong schoolyard taunt. It’s also the closest the album comes to the reproducing the head nodding street anthem quality of “Lean Back,” and you may be tempted to do the Rockaway while singing along “Fifty, Fifty Fifty, he’s the fakest thug you’ve ever seen.”

Miami production duo Cool & Dre, who had a significant presence on previous Fat Joe albums, are promoted to executive producers here along with their heightened profile, thanks to a string of recent hits, most notably The Game’s “Hate It Or Love It.” Aside from the bumping beat and distinctive synth whine of lead single “So Much More,” though, they mostly punch the clock on their contributions. And Dre, who hogs the camera at video shoots as shamelessly as Pharrell or Kanye ever did, insists on doing hooks as often as possible and raps a corny Fresh Prince-esque verse on “I Can Do U.” Meanwhile DJ Khaled, Streetrunner and Just Blaze make off with the hottest beats on the album.

The album ends with a high point and a low point, courtesy of two tacked-on previously released collaborations. The “Lean Back” remix, on which Lil Jon turns Scott Storch’s banger from the original into, well, a Lil Jon beat, is nearly a year old, but holds up well aside from Ma$e’s comeback verse, which may as well have “Summer 2004” stamped all over it. But there’s no reason Joe should be proud enough of his appearance on J.Lo’s “Hold You Down” to recycle it on his own album, and it ends an otherwise decent album on a sour, treacly note.

Reviewed by: Al Shipley
Reviewed on: 2005-07-13

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Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Last night I drove down to D.C. to meet up with my friend Mike and walk to the 9:30 Club from his place for the Dinosaur Jr. show with the reunion of the original lineup. We got there during Bardo Pond, who were boring and whose drummer played the same fill every other measure of every single song. And I ran into Mat and Candy and watched the show with them. I'd seen J Mascis and the Fog a couple times, and those were about the loudest shows I'd ever seen, so I was really expecting it to be like that, but Dinosaur weren't quite that loud. Still pretty loud, but I wasn't really regretting not having earplugs. They're not a real charismatic or exciting band, but it was still a pretty good show, only stuff from the first 3 albums when Lou was still in the group. And the setlist was heavy on the first 2, not much Bug aside from "Freak Scene" in the encore. My love of You're Living All Over Me was recently reignited by the Merge reissue that sounds a hundred times better than the horribly mastered old SST CD, so I was happy to hear all those songs live, which have held up really well ("The Lung"!). J used some weird phaser effects on some songs that made them sound kinda different from the original recordings, but it was an interesting change. I don't have any special reverence for the original Dinosaur lineup, I like some of the later records almost as much, so it wasn't really a big deal for me, although it was cool to see Murph play drums on those songs. But still, I'm glad I went.

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Monday, July 11, 2005
J.G. and I finally found an apartment! It's right off Pratt Street, in Fells Point, Baltimore, literally 5 blocks from my dad's house, so I know the neighborhood well and I'm pretty happy with it. And the rent is less than some places we looked at that were in much sketchier parts of the city. Mostly I'm just hyped to live in the city again, the last couple years I've been up in Cockeysville in Baltimore County because that's where my roommate at the time wanted to move, and I kinda hate being up there. We can't move in until September 1st, but it's good to finally have that settled and know where we're gonna live.

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Thursday, July 07, 2005
Someone I know started a poetry blog, and I honestly don't know if the world is ready for it, but here it is.

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