#1 Kansas lost. #2 Kentucky lost. #3 Purdue (how the fuck are they #3, seriously?) lost their 2nd best player with a year-ending ACL tear and play Michigan State tomorrow. #4 Syracuse, who has had 10 times the schedule of any of the teams above it, combined, just fucking crushed Villanova and clinched themselves a tie for the Big East regular season championship as well as a #1 seed in the Big East tournament. Can you say #1 team in the fucking country? Holy shit. This is not only the best Syracuse team I have ever watched, but also, without a doubt in my mind, the best team in the nation. I don't say that lightly. And someone as pessimistic as me never feels that way about anything. But I feel confident that Syracuse will win the NCAA title this year. They may not. The odds are certainly against them in a free-for-all 1-and-done tournament like the NCAAs. But they are, right now, the best team in the country. I didn't doubt for one second that they would lose to Nova tonight, even after Nova took a first half lead. I just didn't. We were better than them. We were bigger and stronger and tougher. Even though a very similar Nova team beat us 5 out of our last 6 meetings. But they couldn't handle our inside dominance -- Arinze and Ricky were absolutely fucking unstoppable in the second half. And they couldn't handle our zone. And when it was all said and done, we won. Again.
27 and 2. And the best team in the country. I never thought I'd see the day where we weren't the underdog at least against some team in the nation, but other than Kentucky -- who will be very, very tough if we meet them in the Final Four or later, I don't see a team in this nation that we shouldn't be able to handle. We played bad against Pitt and lost. We played really bad against Louisville and lost. So we can play bad and get beat. But if we play well, we will beat anyone, and that showed tonight when we crushed the 2nd best team in the best conference in the nation. And we won't look back.
So I'm in Dallas for the week and I guess there are worse things in the world (like not having a job) but here's just an example of the nightmare that is a travel night in a foreign (or in this case, still American, but foreign to me) place. I left the client at around 5:30 (Dallas time) and stopped at a mini-mart to load up on supplies for the rest of the week, since my hotel doesn't seem to have vending machines that I can find, and as anyone who knows me knows, I need water -- I suck down like 10 bottles a day, so I bought a six-pack for my room and a bag of pretzels and headed back. At that time, I'm thinking, should I grab some dinner while I'm out and I decide no, Syracuse is playing at 7, let me see if I can find a local restaurant that might have the game on and then go out at that point. I get back to my hotel around 6 (Dallas time). Of course, 7 o'clock in Providence (where Syracuse is playing) is 6 o'clock here. So when I fired up my computer and searched on espn.com to see if the Syracuse game might be on one of their networks tonight (it was!) I found out that it had already started. D'oh. So I quickly Googled "live sports on Internet" or something and got to a site that I've been to before (I think when I watched cycling coverage in Europe or something) called Justin.tv and after clicking I was getting spotty but decent coverage of the Syracuse / Providence game on ESPNU. Syracuse jumped out to a big early lead and with around 12 minutes to go, I thought ... hmm... let me see if I can switch to my hotel's free Internet instead of using my Verizon card because maybe that's the reason the game kind of fades in and out. Big mistake. It took forever for me to log off and then back on the hotel's log-in, my computer kept locking up, I was cursing up a storm as the game was going on and I finally got Justin.tv working again only to have it be even more spotty - and unwatchable - and showing only in brief flashes that the Orange lead had fallen from 14 down to 3, with the score 37-34 in the time that I was fucking around with the Internet. Damn. Bill was far from happy.
The Big Three of Canadian Indie Rock (TM, Vague Space) -- Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, and Broken Social Scene -- are all rumored to be coming out with new albums in 2010, which is pretty super-amazing incredible shit, because (a) they each are all kinds of awesome, (b) it's been a couple years since a new Wolf Parade album, more since an Arcade Fire one, and an unbelievable 5 years since Broken Social Scene's self-titled second CD, and (c) did I mention how all kinds of awesome they are, and how incredible this year in music is going to be? Well, BSS are the first to jump the gun with a release date, an album cover, and a leaked single, for May's forthcoming Forgiveness Rock Record. You have to type in an email in the little widget below and from that you can get the mp3 for the song "World Sick." I could just post it for you but I figure you have to go through just a little effort for something this cool. New Broken Social Scene. It's been just a shitty weekend and a shitty first two months of 2010 for me (non-musically) but damn it if my day didn't get just a little bit brighter with some new Broken Social Scene. Check that shit out.
I ran across an amusing story recently, in a debate about whether people in the know should dumb down their approaches to things to reach mass audiences, or whether they should simply disparage the "stupid" masses through cutting sarcasm and refuse to make things more easily understood by those without strong computer or educational backgrounds. I would have usually -- and in this case -- come down strongly on the side of the cutting sarcasm, which is what this post will be about. But I can see what the other side is trying to say, and that something like the iPad may be successful precisely because it is so uncomplicated. I still think the masses need to catch up, and dumbing things down for them -- or blaming Google's search heuristics for generalized computer ignorance -- is a flawed way of thinking. Plus, it's always fun to make fun. The comments on this page had me laughing out loud throughout. But it did make me stop and think.
The video for The Antlers' "Bear" is appearing on Pitchfork TV... and here! The video is the second off their amazing second album, Hospice, which came out in 2009.
Matthew Cooper, aka Eluvium, is returning on February 23rd with his follow up to 2007's wonderful Copia, an album full of great instrumental post-rock. But the new album is titled Similes and it's better than anything Cooper has previously put together. It's an 8 song collection that takes Eluvium to places he's never explored on a record before -- namely, singing (and percussion, and verse-chorus-verse). So while you probably have heard and loved the first released track, the sublime "The Motion Makes Me Last," you will be wowed by the rest of the album, available via Temporary Residence, which happens to be (besides Merge of course) my favorite independent label.
Free at last, free at last. My hellish work schedule is over for the moment and I have time -- just a little bit of time -- to put up a proper new music post. Of course, I feel like I haven't given nearly enough due to all the great albums that have either come out already this year or are coming out soon. I really wish I had the time to go into each in detail but for now, these are the albums you should be listening to if you want to listen to good music. Some are available right now at your local independent record store or Amazon.com or iTunes or wherever you buy music (let's hope some people still buy music). Others have yet to be released but will be released soon and you can certainly pre-order. But this is the music that has inspired me so far in 2010 and gotten me through some really hellish weeks of non-stop work and driving and more work and school and more driving and writing, lots of writing, and listening, to some wonderful music. I hope it will do the same for you.
The Album Leaf - A Chorus of Storytellers
This is a really, really, really good album -- the highlights are the songs in which Jimmy doesn't sing, which has sort of always been the case with The Album Leaf but all the songs on here are strong. "Blank Pages" and "Within Dreams" and "Tied Knots" are my favorites.
Another really excellent album. The one-two punch of "Meridian" and "Black Eyes" to start it off are absolutely brilliant and it's almost hard for the rest of the album to keep up, but then "Castaways" comes along as the seventh song and you're blown away anew.
I just received this from Western Vinyl (who also sent a couple other CDs of bands I never heard of, neat idea) so I can't form a proper opinion just yet but while the new album doesn't seem to have a masterpiece a la last year's "Harm and Boon," it does have an ebb and flow that really grabs me, at least on the first few listens. The first three tracks are really great together.
I talked about this one back in December but it was released this year, it's great, and you should find a way to find it and buy yourself a copy. Really original, amazing stuff, from the label that brought you Neutral Milk Hotel and the rest of the Elephant 6.
Below is the early front-runner for my favorite song of the year -- it's anthemic and magical and absolutely brilliant... it's really long (15:19) and it doesn't hit its peak until some 11 minutes in but it's more than worth the wait, hell the whole thing is perfect. The rest of the album, well, it's pretty great too.
I've been a subscriber to Newsweek for -- I don't know -- probably 15 years or more. It's cheap, ridiculously cheap, maybe $20 or $30 for a year, I don't really know and there's always a half-price deal if you sign up for the next 3 years as well. I used to subscribe to Newsweek and US News & World Report, since before the Internet became the Internet and that was where I got most of my news, but sometime during the Bush presidency US News got too conservative for me (or I got too progressive) and I stopped subscribing. Newsweek definitely leans left, but it's mostly unbiased in its news stories and even in the dying days of magazines and newspapers, I read my Newsweek every week (and my USA Today every day). Call me old-fashioned.
Last May Newsweek took a week off (I think) and re-launched with a completely re-designed magazine, with glossier, heavier paper (which is more expensive) and a better layout and more in-depth and important articles, drifting away from the softer news coverage they may have drifted into so they could become a place where serious news readers would get their news, a risky move since the number of serious news readers has to be dwindling, but one that I have admired. They've also gone the route of ridiculous dramatic headlines (designed to sell more magazines), which is a little disingenuous, but overall, the content in the magazine has been excellent for the past six months and much better than it was before. There's always a long feature article that not only challenges the conventional wisdom on a particular subject but really enhances my knowledge of that subject in ways that I would never get from the Internet, or -- certainly -- 24-hour cable news. As my time has become limited due to constraints at work over the past six months, I've spent less and less time on Daily Kos and 538 and other Internet news sites I used to worship, and I never ever watch cable news, so my entire knowledge of the world has become limited to the Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and what I read in Newsweek (I only read USA Today for Sports and Entertainment). And Newsweek -- a magazine in an age where magazines are dying -- has become my most trusted source for filling my mind with knowledge, and there's really nothing more in the world I could ask for.
I'd forgotten all about the site Archive.org, which has artist-approved archives of brilliant live performances from a wide variety of awesome bands, all laid out with notes and reviews and track-by-track breakdowns, for the most part, easily search-able, and all free!! I mean, seriously, is there anything better than that, for a music fan? And because this week would not be complete without a 3rd post about A Silver Mt. Zion, I'm using the band here to show the great embedding ability that the site allows, which lets me feature the band's entire set from June 16, 2006 at La Sala Rossa in their hometown of Montreal. I've also included a couple tracks from the set, if only so you can download the live version of "Movie (Never Made)," the song posted here yesterday so you can hear the band explode during the "don't be afraid" ending of the track, some 7 minutes in. It's simply majestic, and almost kind of sort of like being there live. And since they are coming around to the States this May, you and I can have a chance to see them live and experience something like this. But thank you Internet Live Music Archive, because this whole site is fucking brilliant.
let's kill first the banker
with his professional demeanor
let's televise and broadcast the raping of kings
let our crowds be fed on tear gas and plate glass
